♀Antoinette Tribou

Antoinette Tribou was a Parisian woman married in turn to two wine merchants of the royal court: both of her husbands, Damien Saint-Amant and Charles Musnier, were among the 25 privileged wine merchants who followed the court. She was the tenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Anne St-Amand.

She is known from two records, the first being the marriage contract of her daughter Anne, made in Paris in 1639 and summarized in a 2024 published guide to the Paris notarial archives. The contract’s phrase, marchands de vin privilégiés suivant la cour, describes merchants who held a royal privilege to supply wine to the court, and its figure of 25 shows how few held it. On 26 February 1639 Anne St-Amand, written Anne Saint-Amant in the contract, was promised in marriage to Nicolas Provost, a master surgeon at Saint-Denis, by a contract made in Paris before the notary Denis Camuset.

By then Damien Saint-Amant was dead, and Antoinette was the wife of Charles Musnier, a bourgeois of Paris^W living in the rue Saint-Denis, in the parish of Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs. She and Musnier acted together for Anne. The contract set Anne’s dowry at 2,000 livres and her dower^W, the provision for her widowhood, at 800 livres, and every party signed it. The contract gives neither her age nor her parents, nor when either marriage took place.

The inventory of 1654

The inventory of 26 March 1654, in the same Paris notarial archives, was made of the estate of her daughter Antoinette Saint-Amant, who had died by then. On that day Antoinette Tribou was living in Paris, in the parish of Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs, and she is described there as the widow of her first husband, Damien Saint-Amant, and as her daughter’s heir. The inventory also names the children of her marriage to Damien: Catherine, Martin, Anne, Marie, Barbe and Jean, of whom Jean was then absent from Paris.