Jean Bouhier (jurist)

He served as the first président à mortier to the parlement de Bourgogne from 1704 to 1728, when he resigned to devote himself to his historic and literary work following his 1727 election to the Académie française.

The Eltons write of him: Bouhier used to read his books and make notes upon them; and it is said that he carried the practice to such excess as to deface with marginal scribblings the finest work of Henri Estienne and Antoine Vérard.

A visitor to his library described the sober magnificence of the rosewood shelves with silken hangings in which the rare editions and long rows of manuscripts were ranged.

[1]He was renowned as much for his erudition as for the splendid library he had inherited from his ancestors, which he expanded and put at the disposal of the poets and writers he welcomed to his hôtel on rue Vauban in Dijon.

At the end of his life the library held 35,000 works and 2,000 manuscripts, but all his collections were dispersed after his death and were mostly sold to Clairvaux Abbey.