Being in possession of a fortune which placed within his reach the gratification of these ardent wishes, he nevertheless did not immediately commence his travels. In defiance of the fashion of the times, which proscribed as unphilosophical the honest feelings of the heart, Choiseul seems to have fallen early in love, and at the age of nineteen was married to the heiress of the Gouffier family, whose name he ever afterward associated with his own. Like all other persons of noble birth, he as a matter of course adopted the profession of arms, and was at once complimented with the rank of colonel, which it was customary to bestow upon such persons on their entrance into the service. At length, after a protracted delay, which considering his years is not to be regretted, Choiseul-Gouffier departed for Greece in the month of March, 1776. Having enjoyed the advantages of the conversation and instruction of Barthélemy, who had himself profoundly studied Greece in her literary monuments, Choiseul-Gouffier was, perhaps, as well prepared to exercise the duties of a classical traveller as any young man of twenty-five could be expected to be. In aid of his own exertions he took along with him several artists and literary men, of whom some were distinguished for their taste or natural abilities. He was transported to Greece on board the _Atalante_ ship of war, commanded by the Marquis de Chabert, himself a member of the Academy of Sciences, and appointed by the government to construct a reduced chart of the Mediterranean. This gentleman, who seems in some measure to have possessed a congenial taste, engaged to transport Choiseul-Gouffier to whatever part of Greece he might be desirous of visiting, and to lie off the land during such time as he should choose to employ in his excursions and researches. On his arrival in Greece, Choiseul-Gouffier commenced at once his researches and his drawings. He was not a mere classical traveller; his principal object, it is true, was, as his French biographers assert, to study the noble remains of antiquity, the wrecks of that splendid and imperfect civilization which had once covered the soil on which he was now treading, with all the glory of the creative arts; but, besides this, he had an eye for whatever was interesting in the existing population, which, with every thinking and feeling man, he must have regarded as by far the most august and touching ruin which the traveller can behold in Greece. The mere undertaking of such an enterprise presupposes an intense enthusiasm for antiquity. Poetry, history, freedom, beauty, animate and inanimate, had separately and collectively produced on his mind an impassioned veneration for the Hellenic soil; and he saw with equal delight the scene of a fable and the site of a city.