Early Life
Pierre Pigneau was born in Origny-en-Thierache (later Aisne, France), where the family of his mother lived. His father's family owned a small estate named Béhaine, in the nearby parish of Marle. Despite the particule "de Béhaine" in his name, Pigneau was not of noble extraction, and it seems the particule first appeared only in the 1787 Treaty of Versailles.
Pigneau de Behaine was trained as a missionary and sent abroad by the Paris Foreign Missions Society (Séminaire des Missions Étrangères). He left France from the harbour of Lorient in December 1765, to work in southern Vietnam. He landed in Pondicherry, then a French possession in India, on 21 June 1766.
Pigneau had arrived just prior to the Burmese capture of Ayutthaya in Siam. After waiting for a few months in the Portuguese colony of Macau, Pigneau travelled on a Chinese ship to reach the small coastal town Ha Tien in Cochinchina (Southern Vietnam) near the Cambodian border, set up by missionaries who had been displaced by the Burmese. He arrived there in March 1767.
Read more about this topic: Pigneau De Behaine
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“In early times every sort of advantage tends to become a military advantage; such is the best way, then, to keep it alive. But the Jewish advantage never did so; beginning in religion, contrary to a thousand analogies, it remained religious. For that we care for them; from that have issued endless consequences.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman.”
—Oswald Spengler (1880–1936)