Leroy

Leroy is a nickname and never a title. In its older spelling Le Roy it is a frequent surname of north-western France, from a byname meaning "the king": in some cases the man crowned king of an archery tournament, in others somebody in the service of the actual king. It belonged to Normandy before it belonged anywhere else, and had spread through the whole country by the Middle Ages. The article is the entire difference between it and the bare Roy, one joke worn two ways.

Jacques Le Roy came out of the seigneurs de Chavigny. His father, René Le Roy de Chavigny, was counsellor and chamberlain to Louis XI and his mother was Madeleine Gouffier; his uncle Guillaume Le Roy de Chavigny held the bishopric of Maguelone briefly. Jacques took the cloister instead of the court. He became a Benedictine and accumulated houses, holding the abbacies of Déols, Villeloin, Saint-Florent de Saumur and Cluny.

He was named archbishop of Bourges in 1537 and died at Paris in 1572. In his time the city was taken and pillaged by the Huguenots, in 1562. The same years brought the city a Jesuit college, founded by Jean Niquet and joined to the university of Bourges.

Charles Georges Leroy, born 22 January 1723, was lieutenant of the royal hunts, and he turned a career spent watching animals into one of the first books ever written on animal behaviour. He kept good company: Denis Diderot, Jean Le Rond d'Alembert and Claude-Adrien Helvétius were his friends.

He put out his observations on the behaviour and the sensibility of animals as letters, signed with the pseudonym of the "physicien de Nuremberg". Leroy died on 11 November 1789 and the final version of the text appeared in the Encyclopédie méthodique in 1793. Its publication was announced in London in 1803, in l'Ambigu, where Jean-Gabriel Peltier judged that the intelligence of animals would stay providence's secret for a long time yet. The book was reissued in 2006 with a life of its author attached.

Pierre-Nicolas-Louis Le Roy de Montflobert was born at Coulommiers on 21 March 1743. His father was an écuyer, seigneur des Noncourtes, de Voisins and de Montflobert, an officer in the king's household and huntsman to the duc d'Orléans from 1742 to 1748; the son went into the same Orléans service and into the king's business affairs. Then the Revolution arrived and he went with it. Sitting on the general council of the commune of Coulommiers, he was elected its mayor on 21 November 1790.

In office he received the constitutional oath of the parish clergy on 28 January 1791 and pronounced a eulogy for Mirabeau on 14 April. Months later he was at odds with the parish priest over the town's decision to inventory the charity hospital, a decision the district court struck down. After the abolition of the monarchy on 21 September 1792 he took the surname Dix-Août, in reference to the journée of 10 August 1792, and he was made a juror of the criminal tribunal created on 17 August 1792 and then of the Revolutionary Tribunal set up on 10 March 1793.

That seat killed him. Arrested on 25 thermidor an II, he was tried with Fouquier-Tinville in the prosecution of the members of the Paris Revolutionary Tribunal, condemned along with fifteen co-accused on 17 floréal an III, and guillotined the next morning on the place de Grève. He was buried in the cimetière des Errancis.

Louis Hippolyte Leroy (1763-1829) was the son of a machinist at the Royal Opera. He was trained as a hairdresser and employed at the royal court of Versailles, and in 1804 he provided the Empress Joséphine de Beauharnais with her coronation costume. That one commission made him. The House of Leroy became one of the foremost fashion houses of First Empire Paris and its founder made himself a millionaire.

He was Joséphine's favourite fashion trader and the official designer of gowns for the women of Napoleon's imperial court, dressing them while Madame Herbault furnished the hats and accessories, and he sold to several other royal and princely courts in Europe besides. According to Imbert de Saint Amand he did not in fact design what he sold: he bought the models from Louis-Philibert Debucourt, Jean-Baptiste Isabey and Auguste Garneray, and passed them on to his customers.

Denis-Sébastien Leroy was born in Paris on 22 December 1769, son of Denis Leroy and Marie Anne Gilson, and became a pupil of the painter and engraver Pierre Peyron before his admission to the École des Beaux-Arts in the middle of the Revolution. Peyron stood as witness when he married Marie Françoise Lebon at Versailles on 6 August 1794. He showed at the Salon from 1795 to 1831, and in 1798, after three failures at the prize, he took the Second Grand Prix de Rome with Le Combat des Horaces et des Curiaces.

His working life was mostly drawing rather than painting. For Antoine-Michel Filhol he made close to a hundred drawings between 1802 and 1815, copying the great masters for Filhol's Galerie complette du Museum central de France. He illustrated Lacépède's natural history of the oviparous quadrupeds and serpents, an atlas for Jean-Baptiste-Léonard Durand's voyage to Senegal, Restif de La Bretonne's Le Paysan perverti, and sets of actors in costume for the theatre. He taught at a free drawing school and gave lessons at home and elsewhere. Reviewing his Adieux d'Ariane et de Thésée, Charles-Paul Landon called it well composed, correctly drawn and carefully executed, the work of a hardworking artist left too little time to paint. Leroy died in Paris on 12 July 1832 during the second cholera pandemic.

Henri Eloy Joseph Leroy was born at Soignies in Hainaut on 1 December 1787. He began medicine at Brussels in 1807 and carried on at Paris in 1810, until parents alarmed by the political troubles called him home; on service at the military hospital at Mons he caught typhoid fever, and only after a long convalescence did he finish his studies and take his degree at Leiden in 1816. He cared for the casualties of Waterloo, then set up as physician to the poor of Soignies and the places around it, work he kept up until 1837.

When the revolution of 1830 came he did not hesitate: he raised a body of volunteers at Soignies to march on Brussels in support of it, and became the town's first Belgian burgomaster, in office from 1830 to 1836. Leopold I gave him a flag of honour in 1832 for the town's part in the revolution, and a first-class medal in 1833 for his own conduct during the cholera epidemic. He presided over the medical commission of Hainaut from 1839 to 1841 and published on acute peritonitis, diseases of the skin and convulsions in infants, and in 1844 the king made him a Chevalier of the Order of Leopold. An immense crowd walked with him to his grave in January 1865, and a street in Soignies carries his name.

Leroy is reckoned the fourteenth most-borne surname in France. Armand Jacques Leroy de Saint-Arnaud (1801-1854) rose to marshal of France, and Léon Auguste Victor Leroy (1877-1937) to general. Raymond Leroy (1908-1943) fought in the Resistance and was made a Compagnon de la Libération.

The name did as well in the studios and the lecture rooms. Eugène Leroy (1910-2000) and Louise Leroy (1879-1969) painted; Catherine Leroy (1944-2006) was a photographer; Gilles Leroy, born in 1958, writes; Maxime Leroy (1873-1957) was a jurist and social historian; Xavier Leroy, born in 1968, is a computer scientist, and Nolwenn Leroy, born in 1982, sings. Mervyn LeRoy (1900-1987) carried the older spelling, capital letter and all, into directing films in America.