AUBIGNÉ, THÉODORE-AGRIPPA d'. - Born at St-Maury (Pons-Saintonge) on 8 February 1552, died at Geneva on 9 May 1630. A man of arms and a poet, an intransigent partisan of the Calvinist sect in the religious wars of his time, he fought under the banners of the Prince of Condé; having escaped the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, he placed himself in the service of Henry of Navarre and followed him in all his enterprises as squire, courtier, court poet, marshal of the camp, governor of Maillezais, vice-admiral of Guienne and Brittany. The king's conversion found him irreconcilable. After Henry IV was assassinated, he opposed the regency of Marie de' Medici, lost his offices and resumed the struggle, taking part in the Huguenot uprisings under Louis XIII. No longer wishing to live in the France that Richelieu was pacifying, and threatened by four capital sentences, he took refuge in Geneva, where he took a wife for the second time, composed his last works, and died, it seems, of grief, over the abjuration of his firstborn son.
He was one of the most eminent figures in that murky age, the very type of the partisan and of the intrepid and intransigent sectarian in the struggles of which an idea is given not only by his Memoirs but also by those of Brantôme, of Montlué, of La Noue. He was a pupil of the reformer Theodore Beza, who had succeeded Calvin. Almost as a child he translated the Crito and learned Latin, Greek and Hebrew very early. After the failed Calvinist plot of the Château d'Amboise, he witnessed, at the age of ten, the execution of the conspirators, and it is said that before their scaffold he swore to avenge them.
He figures in French literary history principally for his poem Les Tragiques (donné au public par le larcin de Prométhée), begun in 1577 and finished in 1598.
After the king's conversion, d'A. withdrew to write an Histoire universelle depuis 1550 jusqu'en 1601, condemned to the flames by the parliament for its sectarianism. His other violently anti-Catholic works are: La confession catholique du sieur de Sancy; Les aventures du baron de Folneste, another libel with violent satires against the Catholic Church and salacious anecdotes about the men of the court and Henry IV himself; an Histoire secrète de Th.-Agr. d'A. écrite par lui-même; another poem, memoirs and poetic collections. One of d'A.'s sons was the father of Madame de Maintenon.