Roger de Gaignières

François Roger de Gaignières (30 December 1642, Entrains-sur-Nohain – 1715, Paris), French genealogist, antiquary and collector.

He was the grandson of a merchant at Lyon and the son of Aimé de Gaignières, secretary to the Count of Harcourt, a member of the Elbeuf branch of the House of Guise. In the late 1660s, he was named écuyer (equerry) to Louis Joseph, duke of Guise. Residing in a fine new apartment just over the stables of the magnificently renovated Hôtel de Guise, François Roger supervised the duke's riding and oversaw his stables, carriages, and footmen. His immediate neighbors in the stable wing were the respected neo-Latinist and translator Philippe Goibaut, who directed the Guise musical ensemble, and composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier, who wrote for the Guise chapel and salon.

After the young duke's death in 1671, François Roger served as écuyer to Louis Joseph's aunt, Marie de Lorraine, who in 1679 appointed him governor of her principality of Joinville and obtained for him a royal pension of 500 écus.

At an early age, François Roger began to make a collection of original materials for history generally, and, in particular, for that of the French church and court. He soon was at the center of a group of art connoisseurs and historians that stretched from Paris to the court of the Grand Duke of Tuscany in Florence. Among the connoisseur-visitors to his apartment was Louis Courcillon ("abbé Dangeau"), and Coulanges, Mme de Sévigné's cousin. Dr. Martin Lister visited him at the Hôtel de Guise in 1698 and admired his collection.

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