Early Life
He was born Leon Papin Dupont, and his father was Nicholas Dupont, a wealthy and noble Frenchman who died when Leo was six years old. He was schooled in Martinique and then in the United States while the French Revolution went on.
He was by nature and upbringing religious from an early age, and had thoughts of becoming a priest. But along with his one brother Theobald he studied law in Paris.
However, he still had strong religious inclinations. He developed his religious viewpoint and was starting to perform numbers of good deeds. He confessed that he had begun merely on a feeling of culpability for having once missed Mass on Ascension day due to taking part on an excursion, but his spirituality quickly matured. In this period, Dupont associated with various religious figures including Saint Madeleine Sophie Barat, foundress of the Society of the Sacred Heart. Upon finishing his law degree, not having seen his mother for six years, he returned to Martinique. His brother Theobald died when Leo was about twenty-four years old in 1823.
In 1827, Leo Dupont married Caroline d'Andiffredi and in 1832 had a daughter Henrietta. However, Caroline died about a year after Henrietta was born. After the death of his wife, Dupont and his mother returned to France and eventually settled in Tours, where Dupont established a law practice.
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“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
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