PEIRESC, NICOLAS-CLAUDE FABRI de. - Polymath humanist, b. at Beaugensiers on the Var on 1 Dec. 1590, d. at Aix in Provence on 24 June 1637.
He traveled through Italy as far as Malta, Germany, Austria, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Asia Minor; then to England, Holland, and Flanders. In 1607 he became a magistrate and then a member of the Parliament of Aix. He was a collector of coins, manuscripts, minerals, copies of inscriptions and of sarcophagi, including Christian ones; he had a substantial library, dispersed after his death, as were his collections. He occupied himself with all the sciences and was in contact with the scholars of his time. Ph. Tamizev de Laroque published 7 volumes of his correspondence in the Collect. de docum. inéd. de l'hist. de France (Paris 1888-98). The National Library of Paris preserves many drawings collected by him, especially in ms. franç. 9530 and in ms. lat. 8958. He discovered at La Gayolle the celebrated Christian sarcophagus (Wilpert, Sarcofagi, I, p. 7 and pl. 1, 3), later reused for the burial of a Syagria, and the other used for Ennadius Felix, son of Magnus, consul in 460, which P. acquired and which has now been lost (L. Chaillan, in Bull. archéol. du Comité, 1913, p. 317, pl. 25-26). The chalice of Sugerius of the abbey of St-Denis, brought to the Louvre and stolen there in 1804, was identified in the collection of J. E. Widener in Philadelphia by Seymour de Ricci by means of P.'s description and drawing (Un calice du trésor de St-Denis, in Comptes rendus de l'Acad. des inscr. et belles lettres, 1923, pp. 335-39). P. described to Girolamo Alendro, librarian of the Vaticana (cod. Barb. lat. 2154, foll. 104 f-109 v), the codex, now lost, containing the chronographer of 354 (v.) which he had obtained on loan from Cristoforo di Assonville of Arras and did not return; the letter dated 18 Dec. 1620 from Paris was published by T. Mommsen (MGH, Auct. antiquis., IX, 1, Berlin 1892, pp. 19-29); the drawings of the Calendar preserved partly in the said codex, partly among the papers of G. Marini (cod. Vat. lat. 9135) were edited by J. Strzygowski (Die Ka-
(Int. Audbert)
a church was erected over the tomb, in which St. John Chrysostom delivered a discourse. From this it is gathered that P. was a girl of 15 years; surprised alone in the house by the soldiers who wanted to arrest her, and fearing for her purity, by a stratagem she succeeded in eluding their surveillance and threw herself from a window, reaching the ground a corpse.