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Ludovic Adrien de Montluzin [Louis Adrien Viallier de Montluzin du Sauzay]
December 12, 1827 - December 26, 1909
Louis [Ludovic] Adrien de Montluzin was bom in Luneville in the province of Lorraine in eastern France, the only child of Louis de Montluzin, a captain in the Second Lancers and a Knight of the Order of St. Louis and of the Legion of Honor. His mother, Rose Tessier de Montluzin, died before his first birthday, and he grew up the son of a soldier, in awe of his father?s military exploits in Napoleon?s campaigns in Spain, Poland, Austria, and Russia and in the battle of Waterloo. Despite his many generations of military ancestors, he was drawn to the scholarly life. After taking a law degree at the University of Paris, he became a journalist in the liberal wing of the Paris press. His friends included Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, and Alexandre Dumas, pere and fils, and for a time he worked as secretary to the elder Dumas, helping do research for his historical novels. With Hugo, he participated in the ill-fated Paris uprising against Louis Napoleon in 1851, and, sickened by the prospects for freedom under Louis Napoleon?s (now Napoleon Ill?s) dictatorship, he chose to make a new life in America.
Accompanied by his son Ferdinand, he traveled by sailing vessel to Louisiana in 1854, expecting a wilderness and bringing with him shovels, rakes, hoes, axes, and saws necessary for clearing the land. To his surprise he found instead the prosperous, cosmopolitan New Orleans of the mid-1850?s. He quickly accepted a position teaching chemistry at Jefferson College in Convent, Louisiana, where he was joined by his wife Reine and their young children Alfred and Jeanne. He divided his time between his professorial duties and his avocation of literature, writing newspaper articles, poetry, and an historical novel based on the career of his father. During the Civil War he organized a number of his emigre friends into the French Company of St. James Parish, serving as its captain-commander, commissioned by Governor Moore to patrol the Mississippi River from Donaldsonville to New Orleans. After the Civil War he established his own lycee, the Ecole Classique et Commerciale, at 122 Conti Street in New Orleans, where he was headmaster until his retirement, following a heart attack, to Bay St. Louis in 1874.
In August 1878 he established a drugstore (the fifth in Mississippi), partly to indulge his interest in chemistry and partly to fill the community?s need for medicine, buying the contents of an apothecary shop on Apothecary Street (later State Street) for $75.00. He then moved into a new shop on Main Street (on a lot adjacent to the present Hancock Bank) and shortly afterwards built a drugstore on North Beach Boulevard. That store burned in 1897, but he rebuilt immediately, the new building standing until it was destroyed by Hurricane Camille in 1969. Never forgetting the country of his birth, he raised funds for French relief during the Franco-Prussian War, served as a consular agent for France, and was awarded Palmes Academiques by the French Department of Public Instruction for his service to teaching. A good citizen, he was one of the nineteen founders of the Hancock Bank.
He was a gentle, scholarly man, of philosophical bent and emotional temperament. He died in his home at 208 North Beach Boulevard on December 26, 1909, survived by five of his children (Alfred, Jeanne, Roger, Rene, and Corinne) and by Reine, his wife of sixty-two years.
[Account prepared by Emily Hosmer de Montluzin and Emily Lorraine de Montluzin, Feb. 2007]