The
Ranums'
Panat Times
Volume 1, redone Dec. 2014
Guise Musicians Joly, Carlier, Anthoine and Montailly
Joly
Nothing is known of Joly, not even his first name. He sang with the Guise ensemble between November 1684 and Easter 1685. People called "Joly" or "Jolly" were not lacking the the households and lands of the Guises: at the time of her death in 1672, Mme de Guise's mother was employing three chamber maids named Joly; and when Mme de Guise herself died, she too had a chambermaid named Joly [Arsenal, ms. 4214, f. 10 v and 58; ms. 6525, f. 35]. A Joly de Saint-Michel, from Mérainville, had loaned money to Mlle de Guise [Chantilly, A, 13, loan no. 78]. Jolys are likewise to be found among the close relatives of the families faithful to these princes, but any attempt to link this musician to one of these families would be idle speculation.
Germain Carlier
Judging from his position in the list of musicians and his modest
legacy of 2,000 livres, Germain-Alexandre Carlier (or Le Carlier) was
among the latecomers who entered Mlle de Guise's in the early 1680s and
began training under Montailly, q.v. and Loulié, q.v.. By the summer of
1684 he was deemed capable of singing a solo part in the Litanies de la
Vierge that Charpentier had just completed. His genealogy suggests that,
during his adolescent years, Germain Carlier did not aspire to be what
we today would call a "professional" singer. Indeed, if he decided to
use publicly the gift that God had given, rather than follow in his
father's footsteps and climb one step in the social hierarchy, it would
seem to be because his family had long served both God and the Guises.
This young man belonged to a family whom the Guises had known for
many years. His father, Nicolas II Carlier, avocat in the
Parlement of Paris, was born into a family of considerable local
standing in the region of Guise. Nicolas I, the young lawyer's father,
had been a lawyer in the royal administration of Ribemont (which
depended upon the duchy of Guise and was situated just seventeen
kilometers southwest of that city); and his brother-in-law, Jean Heduyn,
was a theologal canon at Rozoy-en-Thierache (doubtlessly Rozoy-sur-Serre,
some forty kilometers southeast of Guise).
In August 1650, Nicolas II Carlier married Marie Crevon, the daughter of a Parisian mercer. The groom was apparently still a minor and required not only the presence of his maternal uncle (who doubtlessly performed the wedding mass) but also procuration signed by his parents. He invited representatives from several illustrious parlementary families to sign the contract for him, chief among them Nicolas Potier de Novion, président à mortier in the Parlement. Several guests were closely linked with Gaston d'Orléans: René Brûlart, the nephew of Gaston d'Orléans's chambellan; Charles de Vert, Gaston's surgeon; and Sieur Laurens, Gaston's linger [MC, LXXXIV, 138, marriage, Aug. 7, 1650]. In other words, although Gaston d'Orléans was not necessarily acquainted with Nicolas Carlier, the young lawyer can be assumed to have had an entrée to the domestics' quarters in the Luxembourg Palace.
Shortly before his marriage, Nicolas II Carlier (who called himself a "bourgeois de Paris" on his wedding day), committed himself to purchase, for a yearly payment of 300 livres, the office of "huissier du Roy en sa cour du Parlement." Potier de Novion stood guarantor for him and his bride [MC, LXXXIV, 138, traité d'office, July 7, 1650]. Carlier carried out the duties of this office until his death almost forty years later. In the line of duty, he therefore came into contact with the entourage of Isabelle d'Orléans, then known as "Mlle d'Alençon." As part of Gaston d'Orléans's succession, he and a sergent à verge au Châtelet de Paris prepared the late duke's furniture for exhibit and sale, a task that presumably would have been entrusted to officials in whom the heirs had great trust [Arsenal, ms. 6526, f. 1-1v, a list of expenses involved in settling the estate drawn up in May 1667 by Mlle d'Alençon's guardians].
At some point prior to 1674, a person named Carlier became a part of Mme de Guise's household. Antoine Carlier, sieur de Souillac and écuyer of "Madame la duchesse de Guise dans son palais d'Orléans," does not seem to have been a close relative of the Carliers of Ribemont. He was an heir of Pierre Carlier and Geneviève Picot, who had loaned Mlle de Guise sizeable sums of money [MC, LXXXVIII, 232, inventory, April 9, 1674, which mentions, as document 19, the 20,000 livres loaned to Mlle de Guise prior to 1667; and Chantilly, A 13, loan no. 87.] These Carliers, who were military intendants and commis in Le Tellier's burgeoning war department, were claiming nobility and, alleging that their family papiers had been destroyed, insisted that the loss of these papers had reduced them to living like bourgeois in Clermont in the Beauvaisis. (Clermont is situated some thirteen kilometers northeast of Neuilly-en-Thelle, the town where Anne Brocquoys, Marc-Antoine Charpentier's paternal grandmother, was born!) Superficially, the presence of one of these Carliers in a Guise household seems, at the most, connected to the on-going debt that Mlle de Guise owed the family, but there must be some explanation for the simultaneous presence of two apparently distinct families called Carlier in the entourage of these princes.
How did it come to pass that Germain Carlier was singled out by the Guises for his talents, circa 1680? The answer can be deduced without difficulty. In December 1671, Maurice "Le Carlier," took the habit of a novice at the convent of the Mercy, just opposite the turreted entry of the Hôtel de Guise [A.N., LL 1557, f. 1v]. Born in 1646, Brother Le Carlier was a close relative of Nicolas Carlier, probably his eldest son. After 1671, the Mercy was a magnet for the Carlier family, who lived only a few streets away, on the rue Geoffroy-l'Angevin. Mme Carlier's mother, Marguerite Bourgoin, was buried there in January 1675, her husband was interred in the chapel that the First President of the Parlement owned there in August 1688, and in September 1690 she herself requested to be buried in that church and made the fathers her universal heirs [AN, LL 1560, fols. 68 and 73; MC, XC, 210, will, Sept. 14, 1690]. This was, of course, the church for which the Guises had been benefactors since its creation and where Mlle de Guise was granted a chapel in 1675 and which she held until her death. This was the church in whose devotions the Bailleuls, friends of the Charpentier family, participated actively. This was the church where Marc-Antoine Charpentier's cousins, the Havés de Saint-Aubin, had founded a mass.
If Germain Carlier resided at the Hôtel de Guise during the 1680s, he abandoned his quarters after his protectress's death — which was followed by Nicolas Carlier's demise exactly one year later — and settled back into his childhood home on the rue Geoffroy-l'Angevin, where he lived with his mother and his younger brother, who bore the unusual name "Soelix," and his older brother, Henri Le Carlier, "bourgeois de Paris" [MC, XC, 277, inventory, Mar. 3, 1689]. Germain gave the same address a month after his father's death, when he accepted the first 500 livres of his 2,000 livre slegacy from Mlle de Guise [Chantilly, A 15, April 20, 1689, where he is called "cy-devant musicien ordinaire de la musique"]. Then he and his two brothers disappear from the Carlier family documents, apparently carried off by an illness that left but one survivor, Marie Crevon. In September 1690, clearly shaken by recent events, Marie Crevon went to the notary's office and, with a trembling hand, signed a will that makes no mention of any children and that gives everything to the Mercy — where the religious who appears to have her only surviving son was about to be elected commander.
On the Le Carliers and the Mercy: Le Carlier became commander of the convent in 1690, at forty-four, Hugues Cocard, "Les Pères de la Merci....," Thèse du 3e cycle, Univ. of Angers, November 1982, p. 106 and p. 219, which points out that the name Maurice probably was assumed upon his ordination. Indeed, he is also called "Jean-François Maurice" Le Carlier, p.259.
François Anthoine
Like Toussaint Collin, François Anthoine bears the same family name as provincials with whom Mlle de Guise had dealings — for example, Jean Anthoine, a bourgeois of Paris who owned land in the principality of Joinville, from where Roquette, her intendant, wrote: "L'on cherche avec grand soing les moyens de me faire aboucher avec le Sr Anthoine pour avoir la preuve du payement fait en 1664; M. de Joyeuse" [MC, CXV, 164, bail, Feb. 21, 1664; A.N., 300 API, 922*, Oct. 24, 1682]. The dispute clearly had not yet been resolved by 1682. No trace of François Anthoine has been discovered in the Minutier central. We know that he began to sing for Mlle de Guise in 1687, apparently replacing Marc-Antoine Charpentier as counter-tenor. Despite the apparent brevity of his stay at the Hôtel de Guise, Anthoine was willed 2,000 livres. (Does this mean that he in reality arrived roughly at the same time as Joly and Carlier, but played an instrument until Charpentier stopped singing with the group?)
By April 1689, when the executors were at last ready to pay first installment of 500 livres of Anthoine's legacy, he was living in Rouen, in the home of Sieur Bourdet, rue des Charettes, in the parish of Saint-Étienne-des-Tonnelliers. He therefore sent a procuration to Étienne Loulié, q.v., who collected the money and forwarded it to Rouen. Anthoine had been fulminating against the executors of the Guise estate, demanding his entire legacy, plus interest, but to no avail: he got a partial payment like everyone else [Chantilly, A 15, April 20, 1689; and A.N., R*4 1060, fol. 23]. If one supposes that Anthoine was not a Norman by birth, the most plausible explanation for his presence in Rouen is an invitation from Colbert, the pleasure-loving coadjutor of that archbishopric.
Nicolas Montailly
Trained by the famous Bénigne de Bacilly, Nicolas Montailly not only knew how to compose vocal music, he was a master of sung declamation or, to borrow a contemporary's words, "un fort habile maistre, non seulement pour la Musique, mais pour la manière de chanter, qu'il a apprise de l'illustre Mr de Bacilly, l'espace de quatre années qu'il a demeuré chez luy." Elsewhere the same contemporary paints a similar picture of Montailly's skills: "[il] joint à la science de Musique la connoissance du François à l'égard du chant, et la méthode de bien chanter qu'il a pratiquée sous M. de Bacilly, chez qui il a demeuré pendant quatre ans." And he adds that, "c'est luy qui aprend aux Filles de [read: que] Mademoiselle de Guise entretient dans son Hostel pour sa Musique. Vous scavez que cette magnifique Princesse en a une fort bonne, et qu'il y a presque tous les jours un concert chez elle" [Mercure galant, March 1688, pp. 166-67; and Feb. 1688, pp. 305-06 and 98]. It surely is no coincidence that this publicity, penned by the editors of the Mercure Galant, appeared during Marie de Lorraine's final illness. It is as if Donneau de Visé and Thomas Corneille, Charpentier's collaborators in the theater, were calling attention to a friend who would soon be unemployed.
Though Nicolas Montailly was technically a musician in ordinary to Mlle de Guise, his special treatment in her will — he received a 300 livres pension rather than a lump sum — suggests that this musician was not closely attached to the ensemble and perhaps did not even perform with it. Being willed a pension meant living in uncertainty about whether the payment would ever be forthcoming, for pensions generally were not to be paid until the debts of the Guise estate had been settled. Legacies to domestics were, by contrast, treated as "privileged" and were paid, at least in part, once the most pressing debts had been met. The hypothesis that Montailly's sole function at the Hôtel de Guise was teaching singing is supported by Charpentier's otherwise puzzling failure to compose solo music for a such a highly trained singer.
During the 1690s and the first decade of the eighteenth century, several dozen of Montailly's airs were published in the various recueils d'airs published year after year by the Ballards. In 1692 Montailly, "maître de musique," lived on the quai de la Mégisserie [Y. de Brossard, p. 220].