A Jesuit, Charlet was rector at La Flèche for most if not quite all of Descartes’ eight years there and took special care of both his material and spiritual needs. There developed an attachment that lasted the rest of both their lives and was such that Descartes called him his “substitute father” (AT IV 156). (Descartes was in fact related to him on his mother's side.) He later became one of the five assistants to the head of the Society of Jesus, in Rome. Although Descartes had already at La Flèche exhibited his own way of disputing in philosophy, Charlet found no fault with him, and later Charlet was one of the Jesuits whom Descartes had in mind in his conciliatory comments about Scholastic philosophy as not being contradicted by his own but only completed by it in certain respects (AT IV, 225). Like Mesland, he was a missionary to America but, unlike him, Charlet returned to continue his career in France.

See also Jesuit