The Ranums' Panat Times

For almost twenty years, Jacques II Dalibert kept cropping up! I met him first in the memoirs of the Grande Mademoiselle, Madame de Guise's half-sister. Then he surfaced in the notarial archives at the Archives Nationales, where I discovered that his mother was née Charpentier. (Although I tracked the family back to the early 1600s, I never found a connection to Marc-Antoine Charpentier.) Jacques II Dalibert next surfaced in the diplomatic dispatches of the Foreign Affairs Archives at the Quai d'Orsay, Paris. And then I encountered him in Queen Christina of Sweden's papers in the library of the Medical School, Montpellier (and eventually in the rest of her papers, now in the Royal Archives of Stockholm). Finally, I recognized his hand in the papers at the Archivo di Stato of Turin. Whenever Dalibert and I crossed paths, I jotted down key passages, and sometimes entire letters or notarial acts. I had no intention of writing a "biography" of this amazing man, whose life had already been sketched by Alberto Cametti (see below). Indeed, for my Portraits around Marc-Antoine Charpentier I limited myself to a brief word portrait of Jacques II Dalibert. And although neither Dalibert nor Christina of Sweden appear onstage in Beth L. and Jonathan E. Glixon's new book on Venetian opera (Inventing the Business of Opera), they stand in the wings of that very fine book, nodding their heads in agreement. So much of what the Glixons write about Venice also applies to Jacques II Dalibert and to his experiences at the Roman court of Christina, at the court in Turin, and at his Tor di Nona Theater!

Reading the Glixons' book brought Dalibert back into my center stage. Nearly 6 inches of files about him and the Queen in my study troubled my conscience: "Don't keep that wonderful information to yourself," it kept muttering. To silence that nagging voice, I have cobbled together, mainly in chronological order, the evidence I found about Jacques II Dalibert. To tie together the disparate elements of my narrative, I occasionally cite a text in two separate web pages.

The "fugitive" ­ and incomplete ­ biography that results consists of ten parts:

•  The Jean Charpentiers and their son-in-law, Jacques I Dalibert
•  Jacques I Dalibert: his children and his career
•  Jacques II Dalibert, an adolescent diplomat
•  Jacques II Dalibert, secretary to Queen Christina of Sweden, part 1, 1662-1666
•  Jacques II Dalibert, secretary to Queen Christina of Sweden, part 2, 1666-1689
•  Queen Christina: music and theater
•  Festivities at the French Embassy in Rome
•  Jacques II Dalibert: music and theater in Rome and in Turin
•  Jacques II Dalibert, the final decades
•  Excerpts about Dalibert and Christina, from Franckenstein's Histoire (1697), with facts that either corroborate or contradict the contents of this anonymous source

Some sources and the abbreviations used in this mini-biography on Jacques II Dalibert

AAE ­ Archives of the Affaires Etrangères, Paris

Ademollo ­ Alessandra Ademollo, I teatri di Roma nel secolo decimosettimo (Rome, 1888)

AdiS ­ Archivio di Stato (the appropriate city is specified)

AN ­ Archives nationales, Paris

AN, MC ­ Archives nationales, Paris, Minutier central des notaires

Archenholz ­ Archenholz, Mémoires concernant Christine Reine de Suède pour servir d'éclaircissement à l'histoire de son règne et principalement de sa vie privée (Amsterdam-Leipzig, 1751), 2 vols

Bildt ­ Baron de Bildt, Christine de Suède et le cardinal Azzolino, Lettres inédites (1666-1668) (Paris, 1899)

Bjurström ­ Per Bjurström, Feast and Theater in Queen Christina's Rome (Stockholm, 1966)

BnF ­ Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

Cametti, "D'Alibert" ­ Alberto Cametti, "Giacomo D'Alibert costruttore del primo theatro pubblico di musica in Roma," Nuova antologia, rivista di lettere, scienze et arti, 7th series, vol. 275 (Feb. 1931) This article is the basic biography of Dalibert. I do not repeat everything Cametti found, but my "fugitive" biography contains many materials not consulted by Cametti.

Cametti, "Cristina" ­ Alberto Cametti, "Cristina di Svezia, l'arte musicale e gli spettacoli teatrali in Roma, Nuova antologia, rivista di lettere, scienze et arte, 5th series, vol. 155 (1911), pp. 641-656

Cametti, Tordinona ­ Alberto Cametti, Il Teatro Tordinona, poi di. Apollo (Tivoli, 1938)

Clementi ­ Filippo Clementi, Il carnavale romano nelle cronache contemporanee (Florence, 1939), vol. I.

Franckenstein ­ C.G. Franckenstein, ed., Histoire des Intrigues galantes de la Reine Christine de Suède et de sa cour pendant son séjour à Rome (Amsterdam: J. Henri, 1697)

Glixon ­ Inventing the Business of Opera: the Impresario and His World in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Oxford, OUP, 2006) This is fundamental reading if one wishes to understand Jacques II Dalibert's career as an impresario.

Montpellier ­ Montpellier, France, Library of the School of Medicine, H 258: Christina of Sweden's papers.