Talk:Jean-Baptiste Decoster (guide)

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You're welcome

PBS reverted my additions in one edit, after which he/she gradually but partially reintroduced them (e.g. death year, birth place, Baptiste i.s.o. Baptist) with less detailed refs. Not re-included, for example, is that the man became wealthy as a guide, his family inheriting f300,000. And the text now again confusingly suggests that he was visiting his brother in Plancenoit, rather than that he lived there himself. The edit summary "rv changes to citation style etc. No need to place a citation in the lead per WP:LEAD" for the complete revert is ironic, as PBS then put a citation in the lead him/herself. The references I cited (in standard format), contain much interesting detail but are in Dutch and French. This may be offensive to some of the more patriotically inclined, but is not illegal and can be read by the staunchest monoglot via google-translate. Why these were removed is a mystery.

I don't mind so much what form of his name is used (ironically, Napoléon normalized name spelling in the Low Countries in 1795), as long as the other forms are acknowledged. Dutch and French sources generally insist on "De Coster", which was also used by contemporary English sources: the three contemporary portrait sketches of him viewable on this site are titled "Jean Baptiste Coster, Sketched from Life at the farm of the Belle Alliance Sept. 16 1819 (?) by J.G. Masquerier", "DE COSTER, Guide to Bonaparte at Waterloo. From an original drawing by Stanfield, Price 5 Shillings, Published by ... Covent Garden" and "De Coster. Guide to Bonaparte at Waterloo, C. Stothard ...". A copy of the last portrait is actually used in the article. This suggests that he himself wrote his name "Coster" or "De Coster". Granted, there was much confusion: the name "Lacoste", for example, is used by Hewson Clarke and on the postcard that you use of his house ("Souvenir de Waterloo - Maison Lacoste"). In one authoritative French source you see "Dekoster" based on a baptism record from before the name formalization: Yann Deniau and ‎Yves Moerman in their 2008 "1815 Napoléon en Campagne" write "Flamand d'origine, Jean-Baptiste Dekoster naît à Korbeek-Lo (aux environs de Louvain) le 13 octobre 1760. Il est le fils de Guillaume Dekoster et d'Anna-Maria De Smet.[birthday and parents; you're welcome] Son nom est tour à tour orthographié De Koster, Decoster, De Coster, et parfois francisé même en Lacoste." The one spelling you don't see by contemporaries is "Decoster", even if that is a legit Belgian name (agglutinated names are especially common in West Flanders). Perhaps Scott accidentally introduced it and everyone since then (including PBS) single-sourced the story and the spelling of his name from that, though his own son-in-law, John Gibson Lockhart, still used Jean Baptiste de Coster (even more correct, as particles were not yet capitalized in those days). Does it hurt terribly to at least include the name he actually thought he had and the otherwise so confusing name "Lacoste" in the text? Afasmit (talk) 07:26, 14 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]