Memoirs of Isaac Dumont de Bostaquet A Gentleman of Normandy

About halfway through his memoir, Isaac Dumont de Bostaquet, a French Huguenot nobleman from Normandy who in 1687 sought sanctuary in The Hague due to the persecution following Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes two years previously, wrote that in life’s ‘never-ending miscellany of good and bad’, there are few who ‘have experienced more than I of life’s unhappy aspects’. The eight sections of his memoirs covering the events of his early childhood through adolescence and adulthood to the age of fifty-five, when he leaves Normandy, and then five years of exile spent variously in The Hague, England and Ireland demonstrate that this was neither self-pity nor hyperbole. Overall Dumont’s tale and its telling, although not originally written for publication, make for fascinating reading. Admittedly, his childhood reminiscences are perforce rather dull and the events of his adolescence, including his schooling, military service, 1652–1654, are hardly pacy; but...

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