THE LECOQS
Rouletabille / Great Detective Families

: character present at Wold Newton in 1795.
characters made up for the purpose of connections.
links (not hyperlinks - return to ) to another genealogical tree.
Name on same level may not always be on same age group



SOURCES:

The famous swordsman Pardaillan and of his lover, Fausta, herself a descendent of the notorious Lucrezia Borgia, were the stars of Michel Zevaco's swashbuckling saga, Les Pardaillan.

We postulated that one of their descendents was the notorious adventuress known as "Milady" (her real name was Anne de Breuil), who starred in Alexandre Dumas's classic novel, Les Trois Mousquetaires. Milady was also connected to the aristocratic British family of De Winter, whose family tree is detailed here.

Milady had a son, who used the alias of "Mordaunt". Mordaunt was killed in 1648 by the Comte de la Fère, a.k.a. Athos, in a sequence of events narrated in Dumas' Vingt Ans Apres.

Mordaunt himself had children who carried on his evil inheritance. One such descendent was another unidentified "beautiful woman" who was mentioned as a new addition to the High Council of the Black Coats in 1807 in Paul Féval's Les Habits Noirs. We theorized that she was Anne de Breuil, so named in honor of her ancestress.

Anne de Breuil married Albert Lecoq, who was the valet of the leader of the Black Coats, the man known as The Colonel (as per Féval), and whom we know was also present with his master at Wold Newton in 1795 (as per Philip José Farmer).

Their descendence included Jacques Collin, a.k.a. Vautrin, whose life was chronicled by Honoré de Balzac in the novels of La Comédie Humaine saga, and the man known as Lecoq (de la Perière) or Toulonnais L'Amitié, who continued to serve the Colonel as per Féval's Les Habits Noirs.

Thanks to Féval, we know that Lecoq/Toulonnais had an affair with another member of the High Council of the Black Coats, Marguerite Sadoulas, a.k.a. the Countess of Clare, and we believe that their child was none other than Emile Gaboriau's notorious Monsieur Lecoq. (Gaboriau was, in fact, Féval's secretary.)

The various amorous liaisons of Monsieur Lecoq were recorded by Gaboriau, and by his continuator Fortuné du Boisgobey, who revealed the existence of Lecoq's son, Louis Lecoq de Gentilly, raised in England, in La Vieillesse de Lecoq.

We have theorized that Louis' mother was Jeanne Ballmeyer, née Roussel, the wife of a rich merchant who had two illegitimate children from Monsieur Lecoq. The first was Louis Lecoq de Gentilly, and the other grew up to become, like his grand-father, an international master criminal, known simply as Ballmeyer, whose career was recounted by Gaston Leroux in the Rouletabille novels.

The memoirs of Lucien Lecoq, published in 1908, also tell us that Monsieur Lecoq had an affair with Marguerite Loudet with whom he had three children: Constant (b. 1946), Jeanne (b. 1848) and Lucien himself (b. 1851).

We have further theorized that the children of Lecoq became the progenitors of a line of famous detectives: Jules Maigret, the hero of Georges Simenon's eponymous series; Stanislas Vorobeîtchik a.k.a. Monsieur Wens, whose life was chronicled by Stanislas-Andre Steeman; Isidore Beautrelet, who crossed swords with Arsène Lupin; the mercurial Frédéric Belot, whose adventures were penned by Claude Aveline. These are indeed the great-grand-children of Lecoq!

On the other side of the family, the honor of the name was restored by Ballmeyer's own illegitimate son, Joseph Josephin, a.k.a. Rouletabille who first unmasked, and later killed his father. We have not speculated about any modern-day descendents of Rouletabille.

Finally, Gaboriau revealed the existence of another of Monsieur Lecoq's mistresses, the beautiful Nina Gipsy. We have theorized that she became the ancestor of, last but not least, the noted hawk-faced criminal attorney Prosper Lepicq, whose exploits were recorded by Pierre Very.