Philippe Goibaut

Philippe Goibaut des Bois La Grugère, pronounced: [fi.lip ɡwa.bo de bwa la gry.ʒɛ:rə] (22? March 1629 – 1 July 1694), known to his contemporaries as “Monsieur Du Bois,” (pronounced: [mɛsjø dy bwa]), was a translator of St. Augustine, member of the Académie Française and director of Mademoiselle de Guise's musical ensemble. ("Goibaut" is the preferred spelling: that is how he signed his name.)

One of his detractors claimed that Goibaut began his career as dancing master to the young Louis Joseph, Duke of Guise and did not learn Latin until he was thirty, when the Jansenist “Messieurs” of Port-Royal became his spiritual and intellectual mentors. In 1965 Jean Mesnard’s research into the circle around Blaise Pascal proved the inaccuracy of this legend. Mesnard’s findings have shaped the biography that follows.

Philippe Goibaut was born into a solid bourgeois family of Poitou. His father, Philippe Goibaut, "écuyer" and "seigneur du Bois et de La Grugère" (d. 1638), was sénéchal of Champdeniers, a fief of the powerful Rochechouarts. Young Philippe studied in Poitiers and in 1655 asserted that he was a maître d’hôtel ordinaire du roi. An inventory of his possessions drawn up that year refers to a library of some 200 books in Greek, Latin and French, as well as a viol, a theorbo and a guitar. In other words, by the time he was twenty-five, Goibaut was already skilled in classical letters and was at least a competent performer on stringed instruments. In 1655 he married Françoise Blacvod (d. 1676), the daughter of an official of Poitiers who descended from Adam Blackwood, physician to Mary, Queen of Scots.

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