DIZY (Disy) DE MONTPLAISIR, PIERRE, farmer, seigneurial judge, militia colonel, subdelegate of the intendant; b. c. 1675, probably at Champlain (Que.), youngest child of Pierre Dizy, dit Montplaisir, and Marie Drouillet (or Drouillard); buried on 14 March 1761 at Champlain.

Like his brother, Michel-Ignace*, Pierre Dizy de Montplaisir married a daughter of René Baudouin. His wife, Marie-Madeleine, was the widow of François Lucas Dontigny and the mother of three children. The marriage took place on 11 Nov. 1700 at Champlain. There Pierre Dizy settled, on a part of his father’s land and on his wife’s domain, which was later the subject of vigorous dispute with the Dontigny children.

As the father of a large family and apparently possessing an enviable fortune, Pierre Dizy seems to have entertained some social ambitions. He married four of his daughters to seigneurs and a fifth to the son of a seigneur; Marguerite, the youngest, entered the order of the Nuns Hospitallers of the Hôtel-Dieu of Quebec as a choir nun, and Dizy promised in a written contract to pay the required dowry, “whatever the said dowry may amount to.” Considered one of the leading inhabitants of Champlain and highly regarded by the colonial authorities, he was acknowledged to be “an honourable man,” an “upright man, with whose conduct one can find no fault,” at the 1725 inquiry which preceded his admission to the magistrature.

In 1733 his property still comprised only six acres of cultivated land, but in 1738 it amounted to 25, with eight acres of meadow, a house, a barn, a cowshed, and a stable; he ran it himself until he was about 80. On 2 June 1725 he was appointed judge of the seigneury of Champlain. It is not known whether he occupied this office without a break until the end of his life, or was invested with it a second time. What is certain is that he delivered sentences as judge of Champlain in the years 1754, 1755, and 1758. Moreover, from 1750 to 1755 he acted as judge at Batiscan, and he exercised the same function for the seigneury of Cap-de-la-Madeleine from 1753 to 1755.

Dizy had become a militia officer at least 20 years before he reached the magistrature. In 1705, when he was barely 30, he was a militia lieutenant at Champlain and a militia captain at Batiscan. He was also young when he joined the higher ranks of the militia. Although none of his officer’s commissions has been found, it can be stated that he was already an adjutant in 1714, adjutant general in 1721, and colonel of the militia troops of the government of Trois-Rivières in 1724; he still held this last rank when he died in 1761. On 12 March 1754 he had been appointed subdelegate of the intendant, a function he exercised for some months.

Pierre Dizy’s activity extended far beyond his property and the seigneury of Champlain. He divided his time between the clearing and farming of his land, the exercise of several magistracies, and service in the militia of the government of Trois-Rivières.

Maurice Fleurent