On March 10, 1779, arrived another son, who was called Patrice, after his maternal uncle. His godmother was a sister of Mme. Cormier, married to a former naval officer. The management of his own estates, and, more particularly, those of his wife, occupied the greater part of Cormier’s time in the years preceding the Revolution. Of middle height, inclining to stoutness, with greyish hair and an energetic type of face, the sometime Breton magistrate was quite a personality, for he spoke remarkably well, and, besides being most intelligent, had a real gift of persuasion. The times that were now at hand seemed likely to provide him with a prominent position on the revolutionary scene. We know that, in view of the elections to the States-General, a Royal Ordinance of April 13, 1789, had decreed the provisional division of Paris into sixty districts.[59] A year later this mode of division, being no longer useful, was replaced by a division into forty-eight sections--those sections which, from August 10 onwards, were to exercise so potent a political influence. Cormier was active from the very first. The section of the Place Vendôme had scarcely been formed before he occupied a prominent position therein. We see him first as Commissary of the Section, then as President of its Civil Committee. The General Assembly held its meetings in the old Church of the Capuchins in the Place Vendôme; and Cormier, whose home was close by, took part in the deliberations. He would have played a more active part if other business had not taken up most of his time. Amongst the numerous monarchical clubs which then sprang up in Paris, one had just been founded whose members, for the most part rich planters from Saint-Domingo, used to meet in the Place des Victoires, at the Hôtel Massiac. Their object was to counterbalance what they held to be the pernicious influence exercised by a new society originating in England. This was the _Friends of the Blacks_, and had for its principal object the amelioration of the coloured race.[60] The movement, begun by Wilberforce across the Channel, met with many adherents in France, for it accorded well with the new ideas of enfranchisement and liberty proclaimed by the National Assembly. This very soon became clear to the landowners of the Leeward Islands, who lived on the labour of their slaves, and whose whole well-being depended on their continued existence as such. Saint-Domingo was then in a state of astonishing prosperity. The sugar plantations and the cultivation of indigo and cotton had made it one of the chief colonies. If Wilberforce’s theories were to prevail there, it was all over with the planters and the white people, who formed the minority of the population.