His time, however, was not wasted, and there is evidence that he carried into his busy life a fair stock of classical learning and a true love of letters.  Throughout his life he looked back with pleasure to the time he spent at the University, and his college was remembered in his will when he bequeathed his valuable library.  In this same year, 1653, he graduated B.A.  On the 1st of December, 1655, when he was still without any settled means of support, he married Elizabeth St. Michel, a beautiful and portionless girl of fifteen.  Her father, Alexander Marchant, Sieur de St. Michel, was of a good family in Anjou, and son of the High Sheriff of Bauge (in Anjou).  Having turned Huguenot at the age of twenty-one, when in the German service, his father disinherited him, and he also lost the reversion of some L20,000 sterling which his uncle, a rich French canon, intended to bequeath to him before he left the Roman Catholic church.  He came over to England in the retinue of Henrietta Maria on her marriage with Charles I, but the queen dismissed him on finding that he was a Protestant and did not attend mass.  Being a handsome man, with courtly manners, he found favour in the sight of the widow of an Irish squire (daughter of Sir Francis Kingsmill), who married him against the wishes of her family.  After the marriage, Alexander St. Michel and his wife having raised some fifteen hundred pounds, started, for France in the hope of recovering some part of the family property.  They were unfortunate in all their movements, and on their journey to France were taken prisoners by the Dunkirkers, who stripped them of all their property.  They now settled at Bideford in Devonshire, and here or near by were born Elizabeth and the rest of the family.  At a later period St. Michel served against the Spaniards at the taking of Dunkirk and Arras, and settled at Paris.  He was an unfortunate man throughout life, and his son Balthasar says of him:  “My father at last grew full of whimsies and propositions of perpetual motion, &c., to kings, princes and others, which soaked his pocket, and brought all our family so low by his not minding anything else, spending all he had got and getting no other employment to bring in more.”  While he was away from Paris, some “deluding papists” and “pretended devouts” persuaded Madame St. Michel to place her daughter in the nunnery of the Ursulines.  When the father heard of this, he hurried back, and managed to get Elizabeth out of the nunnery after she had been there twelve days.  Thinking that France was a dangerous place to live in, he removed his family to England, where soon afterwards his daughter was married, although, as Lord Braybrooke remarks, we are not told how she became acquainted with Pepys.  St. Michel was greatly pleased that his daughter had become the wife of a true Protestant, and she herself said to him, kissing his eyes:  “Dear father, though in my tender years I was by my low fortune in this world deluded to popery, by the fond dictates thereof I have now (joined with my riper years, which give me some understanding) a man to my husband too wise and one too religious to the Protestant religion to suffer my thoughts to bend that way any more.”