Mémoires de Messire Jean de Plantavit de La Pause, Livre quatrième (1721-1726)

Mémoires de Messire Jean de Plantavit de La Pause, seigneur de Margon, chevalier de l’ordre de Saint-Louis, lieutenant de roy de la province de Languedoc, colonel d’un régiment de dragons et brigadier des armées de Sa Majesté, Volume 4, since 1721 until 1726, edited and introduced by Hubert de Vergnette de Lamotte, joint publication Centre de recherche du château de Versailles / Éditions du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques (“Documents inédits sur l’histoire de France” Collection), January 2015, 192 p., 15 x 23 cm, €50 (ISBN: 978-2-7355-0838-9).

This publication is the fourth and final volume of the series.

Abstract

Les mémoires de Jean de Plantavit de la Pause, seigneur de Margon, published here for the first time, consist of four volumes, totalling 2,075 pages and covering a period of eighty years, from the birth of the author in 1646 to his death in 1726. Carefully conserved since then by Plantavit’s descendants, today the manuscript is in the Château de Verlhaguet, near Montauban. It has been the subject of study in a programme on the presence of people from the south of France at the court of Versailles in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, organised by the Centre de recherche du château de Versailles.

These Mémoires offer an astonishingly rich chronicle of the life of the nobility in the Languedoc, describing not only marriage alliances and family feuds but the spiritual, cultural and artistic life of the region too. Moreover, as the Seigneur de Margon took part in many military campaigns under the banner of Louis XIV, there are some wonderful passages on the daily lives of those who went to war.

It is therefore a very important source and a previously unpublished account of daily life under Louis XlV.

See film of interview with Hubert de Vergnette de Lamotte, transcriber of the Mémoires, and a descendant of the Seigneur de Margon (interview in French).

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Éditions du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques

Book review

A book review by Sylvain Olivier has been published in the Études Héraultaises (No. 47, 2016, pp. 60-65). The journal is available in PDF format for purchase (in French).