Louis Lambillotte was born at La Hamaide, near Charleroi and began studying solfège, piano, and harmony at the age of seven.
The thirty years of his Jesuit life were spent successively in the colleges of Saint-Acheul, Fribourg, Estavayer, Brugelette and Vaugirard (Paris).
While occupied in teaching and directing music, he gave himself up more entirely to composition, with a view to enhance both the religious ceremonies and the academic entertainments in those newly founded colleges.
As a practical guide towards a radical restoration the Abbot of Solesmes Prosper Guéranger, in his Institutions Liturgiques, had laid down the principle that "when a large number of manuscripts of various epochs and from different countries agree in the version of a chant, it may be affirmed that those MSS.
The appearance of the Antiphonaire de St. Grégoire made a strong impression on the scholarly world, and obtained for its author a Brief of congratulation and encouragement from Pope Pius IX, 1 May 1852, and a "very honourable mention" from the French Institute, 12 November of the same year.
The Gradual and the Vesperal appeared 1855–1856 in both Gregorian and modern notations, under the editorship of Jules Dufour d'Astafort, who had for years shared the work of Lambillotte.
[5] At the same time he calls attention to some serious errors in translation and even in reading, on the subject of rhythm, which, he holds, have been conclusively refuted by Chanoine Gontier, in his Méthode de Plain Chant, pp.
Lambillotte's contemporaries placed the following inscription on his tomb at Vaugirard: Qui cecinit Jesum et Mariam, eripuitque tenebris Gregorium, hunc superis insere, Christe, choris.
(Receive, O Christ, into Thy choirs above him who sang the praises of Jesus and Mary, and rescued the music of Gregory from the darkness of ages.)