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PRELIMINARIES.
Jean Francois Bernard Dumay, born at Vannes, started as a soldier for the army of Italy in 1799.

His father, president of the revolutionary tribunal of that town, had displayed so much energy in his office that the place had become too hot to hold the son when the parent, a pettifogging lawyer, perished on the scaffold after the ninth Thermidor.
On the death of his mother, who died of the grief this catastrophe occasioned, Jean sold all that he possessed and rushed to Italy at the age of twenty-two, at the very moment when our armies were beginning to yield.

On the way he met a young man in the department of Var, who for reasons analogous to his own was in search of glory, believing a battle-field less perilous than his own Provence.

Charles Mignon, the last scion of an ancient family, which gave its name to a street in Paris and to a mansion built by Cardinal Mignon, had a shrewd and calculating father, whose one idea was to save his feudal estate of La Bastie in the Comtat from the claws of the Revolution.