GAULTIER DE COMPORTÉ, PHILIPPE, soldier, seigneur, commissary of the king’s warehouses, provost of the marshalsea, naval commissary; b. 1641 at Comporté, near Poitiers, son of Philippe Gaultier, Sieur du Rinault, and of Gillette de Vernon; d. 1687 at Quebec and was buried there 22 November.

Philippe Gaultier, of a noble family, enlisted in the Carignan-Salières regiment, and accompanied it to Canada. He reached Quebec on 18 June 1665, but on 10 May a court of law in Poitou had condemned him in his absence to capital punishment for the death of two persons (prominent in the district), who had died following a brawl in which he had taken part in order to avenge an insult to the regiment. It was not until 15 years later that the sentence imposed upon him became known in the colony. Because of his honourable life, and thanks to the intercession of the civil and religious authorities, the king granted him letters of remission in June 1680. After leaving the army, Gaultier de Comporté played an important part in the administration of the colony. On 20 July 1670 he was appointed by Intendant Boutroue as the receiver of the 10 per cent tax levied on merchandise arriving in the country. He subsequently became a commissary of the king’s warehouses (1672–78), the first provost of the marshalsea (1677), and, at least on a temporary basis from 1685, a naval commissary. In all these posts he seems to have won general confidence. Talon twice made him his personal procurator, and the nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu de Québec chose him in 1675 to represent them on a commission set up by Bishop Laval* to appraise all their possessions. He was also elected a churchwarden of the parish of Quebec – a great honour in the 1670s – and as such he was involved in the quarrel over precedence, in which Buade de Frontenac and the Conseil Souverain took sides against the vicars general and the seminary, in February–March 1675.

He was successful in business. Two seigneuries (Comporté and La Malbaie) were granted to him; he did not clear them, but sold them at a reasonably good price; later on (1683), he was one of the founding members of the Compagnie du Nord. He went to France as a delegate to obtain the protection of the court, and returned after successfully completing this mission.

On 22 Nov. 1672 he had married in the parish of Notre-Dame de Québec Marie Bazire, the sister of Charles Bazire, one of the most important merchants of Quebec. Gaultier de Comporté and Marie Bazire had 11 children; two of the daughters entered the monastery of the Ursulines; another, Angélique, married Denis Riverin*, a member of the Conseil Souverain and lieutenant-general of the provost’s court of Quebec; and another, Marie-Anne, had as her first husband Alexandre Peuvret* de Gaudarville, the clerk of the Conseil Souverain.

J. Monet