A Martinican, an officer trained at Saint-Cyr, lord of Briord through his marriage in 1850, chief of staff to the King of Naples and the Two Sicilies at the siege of Gaeta.
Of all the masters the Land of Briord has known, Michel-Adolphe Pelet de Lautrec is surely the most novelistic. A Martinican by birth, an aristocrat by marriage, an officer by vocation, a combatant in the service of the King of Naples, an unsuccessful candidate in the legislative elections, a litigious châtelain, a forsaken husband, a soldier returned to the ranks at the end of an eventful life — he embodies on his own a good part of the figures of nineteenth-century France. His story, which the departmental archives of Loire-Atlantique, the officer's file at the Defence Historical Service, and the regional press now allow us to reconstruct, resembles no other.
Briord did not come to Pelet de Lautrec through purchase or paternal inheritance. The estate entered his life through his marriage, on 17 June 1850, to Mathilde Pantin de La Guère — daughter of Louis-Julien Pantin de La Guère and of Marie-Zénobie Jaillard de La Maronnière. It was Mathilde's father who had acquired Briord in 1833 from Jean-Anne-Thomas Dubois-Violette. The young bride thus brought the estate in her marriage portion. Pelet de Lautrec became, at 23, the master of a Nantes folie of the Pays de Retz — he who had until then been a second lieutenant of colonial infantry and who, only three months later (13 September 1850), would resign from the army.
Michel-Adolphe Pelet de Lautrec was born at Fort-de-France, in Martinique, in 1827. His father, Jean-Baptiste-Gabriel Pelet, was an infantry captain. His mother, Rose-Marie Duval de Sainte-Claire, belonged to an important Martinican family: she was a cousin of the Count of Puyferrat and of Colonel Colas de Courval, and niece of Charles-Georges de Cacqueray-Valolive, procurator then deputy of Martinique. The father, Jean-Baptiste Pelet, is said to have been a bodyguard in the 4th company of the royal guard of Louis XVIII in 1815, a Knight of the Legion of Honour, and would be in 1839 the first mayor of Le Marin (Martinique).
It was at the time of his admission to the Legion of Honour that the father had his surname corrected by adding to it that of Lautrec, borne — he claimed — by his ancestors. He said he was descended from the counts of Toulouse and the viscounts of Narbonne, through a Pelet-Narbonne branch. An offshoot was said to have settled in the West Indies in the seventeenth century. But the genealogical evidence found does not establish this kinship with any certainty. It is a plausible aristocratic reconstruction, but unproven — which would weigh heavily in what followed.
As a young man, Michel-Adolphe graduated from the Saint-Cyr Military Academy and was appointed second lieutenant in the 2nd colonial infantry regiment on 1 October 1846. Having become a lieutenant in the 47th line infantry regiment, he came to mainland France. It was at Nantes that he married Mathilde Pantin de La Guère, on 17 June 1850. The young couple settled at Briord after the birth at Nantes, in 1851, of their only son Marie-Raymond-Bernard.
Michel-Adolphe at once styled himself "viscount" and behaved as a châtelain. It was at his initiative that the chapel of Briord was enlarged, consecrated to Saint Germain and the Virgin, and solemnly blessed on 15 June 1853. He also placed, on the pillars flanking the entrance to the courtyard, stone plaques bearing coats of arms: on the right, those of the Pantin de La Guère and Jaillard de La Maronnière; on the left, his own joined to those of the Pantin. He thus took possession of the estate in the literal sense.
But the place taken by Pelet de Lautrec among the Pantin de La Guère soon aroused jealousies. His brothers-in-law Henri and Paul looked with a poor eye on this Martinican officer of uncertain ancestry. In 1857, two individuals — Fabius Filippi, French consul at Nantes, and a cleric named Bassus — claimed to hold defamatory documents about the Pelet de Lautrec and proof that they were not noble, that they usurped a title. They attempted to blackmail the young officer's mother-in-law, valuing the documents at 300,000 francs.
No doubt in league with the Pantin de La Guère brothers, they proposed an arrangement: the early division, within 48 hours, of the parents' fortune, to the benefit of the three children, with the lion's share for the two brothers. Lautrec being absent, he could not oppose it, and his wife would be all but disinherited. A substantial correspondence ensued, with visits, threats, alliances and reversals worthy of a Balzac novel. The viscount's father travelled the 2,000 leagues separating Martinique from Briord to meet the Viscount de La Guère: he found the door closed. Lautrec counter-attacked, published a factum, and circulated it to every château in the department. The affair had no sequel — the countess's parents died soon after: Louis Pantin de La Guère in 1860, Marie-Zénobie Jaillard de La Maronnière in 1864. The estate of Briord then reverted fully to the countess.
In 1859, Napoleon III supported Italian unity. In May 1860, Garibaldi landed in Sicily. Naples capitulated on 8 September 1860 and the young king Francis II — 24 years old — took refuge in the citadel of Gaeta. A keen movement of opinion arose in France, moved by the courage and misfortune of the monarch. Former papal zouaves and legitimists spontaneously entered his service.
Pelet de Lautrec, a legitimist officer who had resigned since 1850, was one of them. He became chief of staff to Lieutenant General de Riedmatten, commander-in-chief of the land front of Gaeta. Alongside other Frenchmen — including Urbain de Charette, aide-de-camp, and the second lieutenant Viscount de Puyferrat — he lodged on the highest floor of the archbishop's palace under the Piedmontese bombardments. The engravings published in Le Monde illustré at the time of the siege depict him in the king's immediate entourage. Phlegmatic during the siege, "Captain de Lautrec drinks a dozen cups of tea" a day. On 22 January 1861, "MM. de Lautrec and Urbain de Charette at his side proved themselves with the same courage".
Charette was wounded in the head by a shell fragment. Promoted major, Lautrec rose to the office of chief of staff to the king.
The situation was hopeless. Under English pressure, the French squadron left Gaeta on 19 January 1861, isolating the stronghold. Typhus appeared, a breach was opened on the sea side. The capitulation came on 13 February 1861. The next day, Francis II boarded the French despatch boat La Mouette, which took him with his suite to Terracina, whence he made his way to Rome. On 18 February 1861, Victor Emmanuel became King of Italy.
Pelet de Lautrec followed the deposed king into his Roman exile and was received with him by Pope Pius IX. It was at this moment that the sovereign pontiff gave the viscount relics of Saints Peter and Paul and a fragment of the True Cross. These relics would be brought back to Briord, then given to the parish of Port-Saint-Père in 1862 for the building of the new church, part of whose timberwork he also financed (a subscription of 6,000 francs; his mother-in-law pledged 12,000 francs' worth of oak).
Back at Briord in 1862, Pelet de Lautrec was a notable. He was a Knight of the Order of Saint George of the Reunion and a first-class Knight of the Order of Francis I of the Two Sicilies. A landowner, he took to agriculture — or at least showed interest in it: as early as 1855, his Briord farm was recognised for its equipment (dairy, fertiliser storage, divisible stable), and he won awards at agricultural shows for his oxen, farm produce and poultry. In 1868, he was secretary of a commission of inquiry into the commercial question, which he presented to the legislative body the following year.
At the same period, he had built on the rear façade of the château a half-engaged tower, of three storeys, surmounted by a candle-snuffer roof carrying a double clock. The land register dates the construction to 1866. The cartouche today bears the date "1787", but this inscription is apocryphal — it was engraved after the fact, no doubt to lend credence to antiquity. Photographs taken at the end of the works still show the putlog holes of the scaffolding and the rough voussoirs of the lintels. One may suppose that Pelet de Lautrec wished, by this tower, to assert the antiquity of Briord against the rival seigneury of La Tour, of which Grandville was heir. With its roof of medieval inspiration, it does not particularly beautify the whole.
For the opposition between Briord and Grandville — between Pelet de Lautrec and Count De Moulins de Rochefort — did not abate. The rebuilding of the parish church was its first battlefield. A first neo-Gothic project was deferred. The project was resumed in 1862 at Lautrec's instigation. But in 1864, relations with the parish priest Leray deteriorated. In 1865, the foundation stone was laid by Bishop de La Hailandière. Madame Pantin de La Guère had undertaken to supply the oak for the timberwork, but she died (1864) before doing so; her heirs refused to deliver it. The parish council procured other wood, sued the Pantin de La Guère and the Pelet de Lautrec, and won the case on 14 August 1874.
Meanwhile, the opposition became political. In 1869, Pelet de Lautrec stood in the legislative elections in the 4th constituency: a royalist candidate, he obtained only 879 votes against 13,727 for the re-elected Bonapartist. In 1871, however, he was elected municipal councillor of Port-Saint-Père with 211 votes — he came top — and became mayor. But in 1872, a prefectoral envelope that he imprudently opened earned him a two-month suspension in January 1873, then dismissal. At the 1874 municipal elections, the Grandville clan swept aside his own: Lautrec was no more than 17th with 161 votes, excluded from the council.
At the by-elections of 1876, he tried one last time, without success.
His contested ancestry, his stiff temperament, his "naturalised" Francophilia (he would have to have his status as a Frenchman restored in 1875, having lost that status "by serving without authorisation in the troops of the King of Naples") all told against him.
The most singular episode of Pelet de Lautrec's life is that of Théotiste Covarel. At the start of 1877, Lautrec visited Marie-Julie Jahenny, the seer of Blain. There he met Abbé Cloquet, grand vicar of the contested bishop of Maurienne, who told him of Théotiste — a young Savoyard woman to whom twenty-two apparitions were attributed between April 1873 and July 1874, committed to the Bassens asylum in June 1875.
Thanks to his connections, Lautrec had her released and brought her to Nantes. She was received at the bishop's palace by Bishop Fournier, who gave her a cross containing fragments of the True Cross.
Despite the bishop's recommendations (to have Théotiste enter a convent), she was engaged, at the urging of Abbé Cloquet, as a chambermaid at Briord. There, the couple's dissensions — disagreements over the conduct of their son, who loved women and gambling — met the mysticism of Théotiste. The Virgin, she said, appeared in the countess's bedroom. There was talk of the salvation of France, of the sale of the château, of the son's conversion. The countess let herself be convinced; the couple tore itself apart.
On 12 April 1878, the civil court of Paimbœuf pronounced the legal separation. On 16 July 1879, the Rennes court of appeal pronounced the separation of property. On 7 November 1879, a judgment ordered the seizure and placing under sequestration. But matters became bogged down: the countess recalled Théotiste, granted a fictitious lease of Briord to her brother, and continued to borrow from the Crédit Foncier. By the end of 1881, the capital debts exceeded 697,000 francs.
The proceedings multiplied: separation, cancellation of the lease, various objections.
In May 1880, Pelet de Lautrec was prosecuted for insults against the court president Feildel and against the mayor Pichelin; he was sentenced to 8, then 15 days' imprisonment (sentences overturned on appeal). The journalist Maurice Schwob, in Le Phare de la Loire, concluded that the irremovability of the magistracy should be reconsidered — but no matter: Lautrec's personal history was already written.
In August 1881, Pelet de Lautrec was residing in the town of Port-Saint-Père, had sold off his own property, and was preparing to leave mainland France to return to Martinique. His presence at Le Marin is attested in July 1883. He renounced the benefit of the judgments rendered in his favour and even authorised his wife to contract new loans.
Briord, burdened with mortgages, was put up for sale. After the dispersal of the furniture (April 1885, for 9,853 francs), the château and the lands — 250 hectares — were sold by auction on 25 November 1885 to Jean-Simon Voruz, the Nantes founder, on behalf of his minor grandson Jean-Baptiste Étienne (15 years old). The price: 530,000 francs, or about a third of the real estimated value.
This was the end of the Pelet de Lautrec presence at Briord, after 35 years.
In 1892, Pelet de Lautrec, settled in Martinique, applied to return to service — as a simple soldier. He obtained a letter of recommendation from General Jamont to the artillery director of the island. It was intended to appoint him librarian at the artillery directorate, but the post in town did not please him. Colonel Pelletier wrote to General Jamont in June 1892: "Two months ago I had this very honourable old man appointed to the post of battery keeper that he desired [...] he who was chief of staff to the King of Naples and one of the most brilliant military attachés of the court of Vienna, now has hands as calloused as a ploughman's; [...] living on nine sous a day, he had taken in three old Black men."
And Lautrec himself, keeper of the fort of the Îlet aux Ramiers at the entrance to the bay of Fort-de-France, wrote to his protector: "I am happy, very happy." He now signed "Lautrec, quite simply; having become a simple soldier again, I must forget the past."
On 1 October 1893, Le Phare de la Loire published an obituary: "Count Pelet de Lautrec, former owner of the château of Briord at Port-Saint-Père, has died in Martinique, where he had resided for seven or eight years [...] his numerous and varied lawsuits were enough to keep at the civil court of Paimbœuf an average of cases that would have prevented its abolition [...] He was a man of fine manners and a very grand air, who had the bearing of a medieval paladin, loved to the point of adoration by some, loathed by others." The journalist concluded: "It is a pity he did not write, even in his somewhat exclusive manner, the story of his life: he would have left a document that would certainly not have been charged with dullness, and that would have been more than once as gripping as a cloak-and-dagger novel."
Countess Mathilde remained in Nantes, on the Rue Saint-Clément then at 32 Rue Saint-André, ever faithful to her mysticism.
She died without fortune in 1913. Théotiste Covarel had died in 1908.
Of Michel-Adolphe Pelet de Lautrec, three marks remain visible at Briord. The chapel, transformed and blessed in 1853 and dedicated to Saint Germain. The armorial plaques of the entrance pillars, which he had installed in 1850. And above all the tower of 1866 on the rear façade — that neo-medieval construction that Jean-Simon Voruz would raise by one storey and crown with a dome and a lantern (campanile) in 1887, thus transforming a work of Lautrec into the most characteristic silhouette of the château.
In the gallery of the masters of Briord, Pelet de Lautrec is the most Balzacian figure: a novelistic, uncompromising, litigious, mystical, ruined man, who ended his life in poverty in a West Indian fort after dreaming of saving a kingdom. The journalist of Le Phare de la Loire was right: it was a novel that should have been written.