Château Haut-Batailley: The Guestier Era
The union between the proprietor of the Batailley estate Jeanne Pécholier and the mariner Jacques Bedout bore no offspring, and so when the latter died in 1818 there was no-one to inherit the estate, and it was put up for auction. One hundred years previously such a fine estate would probably have been snapped up by a wealthy comte or vicomte, but in the post-revolutionary years there were no longer huge numbers of noblemen with the necessary means to take on such a property. Those that had not been relieved of their heads by the slice of the guillotine were now rapidly being relieved of their worldly possessions instead, achieved through a much more modern system of punishment known as taxation. The hole this left was filled by the merchants, the new wealthy elite, and thus it is perhaps not surprising that the property was acquired by Daniel Guestier of the négociant firm Barton & Guestier.
Daniel Guestier acquired the two-thirds sold by the Saint-Martin sisters with this purchase, and it is likely he later acquired the part that their brother, the priest, had retained.
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