Inasmuch as he was over thirty years of age at this time, it may be thought that he might have been left to choose a wife for himself.  But a young officer of rank in France, under the Old Regime, was not so free in these matters as he would be nowadays.  Marriage was much more than a personal affair.  It was even more than a family affair.  People of rank did not so much marry as “make alliances”—­or rather, submit to having them made for them.  It was quite a regular thing for a marriage to be arranged by the families of two young people who had never even seen each other.  An example of that kind will appear presently.

The idea that the Comte de Laperouse, one of the smartest officers in the French King’s navy, should marry out of his rank and station, shocked his relatives and friends as much as it would have done if he had been detected picking pockets.  He could not, without grave risk of social and professional ruin, marry until he had obtained the consent of his father, and—­so naval regulations required—­of his official superiors.  Both were firmly refused.  Monsieur de Ternay, who commanded on the Ile-de-France station, shook his wise head, and told the lover “that his love fit would pass, and that people did not console themselves for being poor with the fact that they were married.” (This M. de Ternay, it may be noted, had commanded a French squadron in Canada in 1762, and James Cook was a junior officer on the British squadron which blockaded him in St. John’s Harbour.  He managed to slip out one night, much to the disgust of Colville, the British Admiral, who commented scathingly on his “shameful flight.”)

The father of Laperouse poured out his forbidding warnings in a long letter.  Listen to the “tut-tut” of the old gentleman at Albi:—­

“You make me tremble, my son.  How can you face with coolness the consequences of a marriage which would bring you into disgrace with the Minister and would lose you the assistance of powerful friends?  You would forfeit the sympathies of your colleagues and would sacrifice the fruit of your work during twenty years.  In disgracing yourself you would humiliate your family and your parents.  You would prepare for yourself nothing but remorse; you would sacrifice your fortune and position to a frivolous fancy for beauty and to pretended charms which perhaps exist only in your own imagination.  Neither honour nor probity compels you to meet ill-considered engagements that you may have made with that person or with her parents.  Do they or you know that you are not free, that you are under my authority?” He went on to draw a picture of the embarrassments that would follow such a marriage, and then there is a passage revealing the cash-basis aspect of the old gentleman’s objection:  “You say that there are forty officers in the Marine who have contracted marriages similar to that which you propose to make.  You have better models to follow, and in any case what was lacking on the side of birth, in these instances, was compensated by fortune.  Without that balance they would not have had the baseness and imprudence to marry thus.”  Poor Eleonore had no compensating balance of that kind in her favour.  She was only beautiful, charming and sweet-natured.  Therefore, “tut-tut, my son!”