Contemporary with this head in name and blazon lived his cousin François, son of Amaury, Michel's younger brother. François, born 19 February 1683, owned the small lordships of the Touches and the Villeneuve. He married, on the 27th of August 1713, Pétronille Claude Lamour, Dame de Lanjégu, by whom he had four sons: François Henri, René (my father), Pierre Seigneur du Plessis and Joseph Seigneur du Parc. My grandfather, François, died 28 March 1729; in my grand-mother, whom I knew in my childhood, lingered a beautiful expression of the eyes, which seemed to smile in the shade of her many years. At the time of her husband's death, she was living in the manor of the Villeneuve, in the neighbourhood of Dinan. My grandmother's whole fortune did not exceed 5,000 livres a year, of which her eldest son took 3,333 livres, leaving 1,666 livres a year to be divided among the three younger sons, of which sum the eldest again first took the largest share. To crown the misfortune, my grandmother's plans were thwarted by the characters of her sons: the eldest, François Henri, to whom the magnificent heritage of the lordship of the Villeneuve had fallen, refused to marry and became a priest; but instead of seeking the benefices which his name would have procured for him, and with which he could have supported his brothers, prompted by pride and indifference, he asked for nothing. He buried himself in a country vicarage, and was successively Rector of Saint-Launeuc and of Madrignac in the Diocese of Saint-Malo. He had a passion for poetry; I have seen a goodly number of his verses. The jovial character of this sort of high-born Rabelais, the cult of the Muses practised by this Christian priest in his presbytery, aroused no little interest He gave away all he possessed and died insolvent. My father's fourth brother, Joseph, went to Paris and shut himself up in a library: every year his younger son's portion of 416 livres was sent to him. He lived unknown amidst his books, occupying himself with historical research. During his life, which was a short one, he wrote to his mother on each first of January: the only sign of existence he ever gave. Strange destiny! There you have my two uncles, one a man of erudition, the other a poet; my elder brother wrote agreeable verse; one of my sisters, Madame de Farcy, had a real talent for poetry; another of my sisters, the Comtesse Lucile, a canoness, might have become known through a few admirable pages; I myself have blackened no little paper. My brother died on the scaffold, my two sisters quitted a life of pain after languishing in the prisons; my two uncles did not leave enough to pay for the four boards of their coffin; literature has caused my joys and my sorrows, and I do not despair, God willing, of ending my days in the alms-house.