Arnaud d'Ossat

Arnaud d'Ossat (20 July 1537 – 13 March 1604) was a French diplomat and writer, and a Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, whose personal tact and diplomatic skill steered the perilous course of French diplomacy with the Papacy in the reign of Henry IV of France.

Arnaud d'Ossat, son of Bernard d'Ossat, was perhaps born at Larroque-Magnoac in Gascony; a contract entered into by M. Arnaud d'Ossat on April 22, 1559, states that he was from La Nogue en Maignac. His mother, Bertrande de Conté, was a native of Cassignebere in Gascony, the property of the Lords of Ramefort. Hence the conjecture (which goes back to Scipion Dupleix' Histoire d' Henri IV of 1635) that Armand was the bastard son of the Lord of Ramefort. Many of the important connections in Ossat's life were with other southerners, the most prominent being Henri IV himself.

On December 26, 1556, he was received into the clergy, by being tonsured by Dominique de Bigorre, Bishop of Albi, administrator of the Diocese of Auch in the name of Cardinal Ippolito d'Este (1551-1563). He was sent first to the nearby College of Auch as tutor to the sons of a local merchant, Thomas de Marca, then, in the first week of May, 1559, to the Collège de France, Paris. There he studied rhetoric and philosophy for more than two years with the famous humanist logician and mathematician Petrus Ramus, who became his friend. He was unfortunately drawn into an academic dispute between his master Ramus and the famous Jacques Charpentier, Rector, Dean, Censor, and finally (in his victory over Ramus) Professor of Medicine and Mathematics at the College Royale (1566). Seeing his own reputation and prospects diminishing as a result of the quarrel, Ossat withdrew to Bourges at the end of 1565 or beginning of 1566. He studied law briefly at Bourges under the famous legist Jacques Cujas, though his legal studies ultimately filled more than two years. He was back in Paris by September 8, 1568, when he wrote to his mother that he was going to practice as an advocate before the Parlement of Paris. Around the same time he agreed to act as a director of the studies of the twenty-three year old Jean de la Barrière, the abbot of the Feuillants and its eventual reformer, who was eager for guidance in the pursuit of an ecclesiastical career.

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