This was a rapid advance in his career, and his parents might justly be proud of it; but fortune meant to lavish very special favours on the young magistrate, for on October 27 in the following year, another position falling vacant in the same department--that of Crown Prosecutor--Yves Cormier, exchanging the sitting magistracy for the standing, obtained the place. Crown Prosecutor at twenty-two! This was a good beginning. For fifteen years he practised at Rennes. That town was going through troublous times. The arrival of the Duc d’Aiguillon as Governor, and his conduct in that position, created an uproar in the ancient city, jealous, as it had always been, of its liberties. The states proclaimed themselves injured in their rights. Led by La Chalotais, they obstinately fought against the claims of the King’s representative, the Duke d’Aiguillon. And there ensued an interminable paper-war--pamphlets, libels, insults--which did not cease even with the imprisonment of La Chalotais and his followers. Ancient quarrels against the Jesuits were mixed up with these complaints of the encroachments of Royal; and the angry Chalotistes ended by accusing them of being the cause of all their misfortunes. It was naturally impossible for the Crown Prosecutor to escape being mixed up in a business which caused such rivers of ink to flow, and created such an endless succession of lawsuits. A police report accused him “of having ‘done a job’ in the La Chalotais affair.” But he had only played a very passive part in it. His name only figures once[54] in the voluminous _dossiers_ so meticulously rummaged through of late years; and that is in a defamatory pamphlet (which, moreover, was torn and burnt by parliamentary decree), denouncing him as a participator in those Jesuit Assemblies, upon which the full wrath of the Breton parliamentarians descended.[55] The utmost one can say is that Cormier perhaps inclined towards the Duc d’Aiguillon’s party, which, moreover, his position as Crown Prosecutor more or less obliged him to do. Was it at that time that he began to pay repeated visits to Paris? Very likely. At all events, from 1776 Yves Cormier practised only intermittently. His father was dead. He lived with his mother on the second floor of the Rue de Montfort house. Tired of bachelor life, the young magistrate, who was then entering his thirty-sixth year, resolved to marry. He had met in Paris a young lady from Nantes, who belonged to a family of rich landowners in Saint-Domingo. Her name was Suzanne-Rosalie de Butler; she was a little younger than he, and had rooms in the La Tour du Pin Hotel, Rue Vieille-du-Temple.