Francis, a remarkable writer, and also the author of that irreconcilable enmity which still subsists between the Jesuits and Jansenists, was born at Angoulême in 1585, and entered the Jesuits' College in 1600. As he had a quick imagination, a strong voice, and a peculiar turn for wit, he became a popular preacher in the chief cities of France; but not content with this honour, he distinguished himself still more by his writings, which were bold, licentious, and produced much controversy. The most considerable in its consequences was entitled La Somme Théologique des Vertez capitales de la Religion Chrétienne, which was first attacked by the abbot of St Cyran, who observing in it a prodigious number of falsifications of the Scriptures and of the fathers, besides many heretical and impious opinions, conceived that the honour of the church required him to undertake a refutation of it. Accordingly he published an answer, whilst Garasse's book was also under examination of the doctors of the Sorbonne, by whom it was afterwards condemned. Garasse replied to St Cyran; but the two parties of Jesuits and Jansenists, of whom these were respectively the champions, gradually conceived such an implacable animosity against each other, that it is not even now likely to subside. The Jesuits were forced to remove their brother to a distance from Paris, where, weary of his inactive obscurity, he begged leave of his superior to attend the sick, when the plague raged at Poitiers in 1631, and in this charitable office he caught the prevailing distemper, and died.