He was born in the village of Saint Aubin de Baubigné, near Châtillon-sur-Sèvre, in the broad-moated, wood-surrounded feudal castle of La Durbellière, on the thirtieth of August, 1772. He came of fighting stock. Among the ancestors of his name there were Crusaders, two warriors slain under Francis I. at Pavia, and a dear brother-in-arms of Henry of Navarre, who was wounded beside him on the battle-field of Arques. Henri’s father, the Marquis Henri-Louis-Auguste, died of the opening of an old scar in 1802, after able service in San Domingo, where he was defeated, with his English allies, by the blacks and the forces of Spain; his wife, a proprietress there, described in the parish books at home as “the high and powerful lady Constance-Lucie-Bonne de Caumont Dade,” was destined to survive her son also, but not long. They were the parents of two other sons and of four daughters, of all of whom it is perfect eulogy to say that they were alike. Henri, the second child and eldest boy, was intended for the military profession: while the supreme political storm was brewing he was completing his studies at Sorèze. This famous school in Lower Languedoc was just then, under the benignant rule of Dom Despaulx, in its prime. In the great plain under the shadow of Pepin’s Tower, the Benedictines could marshal their four hundred boys, in blue uniforms faced with red. Henri was probably something less than an enthusiast in botany and dancing (for all the arts had excellent show at Sorèze), but gentle as he was, he had no disrelish for the novitiate of war. He must have apprehended, even at the still college where, long after, the radical Republican, Père Lacordaire, set his bust to smile down upon the bent heads of the study hall, what strange transatlantic winds were already blowing over France. He looked forward always to a campaign, to spurs and sabres, and some mighty Jericho to assail. Courage he had as a birthright; the splendid animal nonchalance in face of danger, and, later, in a measure almost as ample, the fortitude of soul which “endures and is patient.” He went directly from school to Landrécy in 1785, joining the garrison as sub-lieutenant, his first commission being in the Royal Polish regiment, of which his father was then colonel. The marquis, a person of worth and fortune, had every reason to be pleased with his pretty cavalryman of thirteen, who had to get along as he could, without public favors, and who was treated with complimentary strictness.