Diary of Samuel Pepys, Preface and Life | Page 8

Mr. Spendluffe's
scholarships, and two years later (October 14th, 1653) he was preferred
to one on Dr. John Smith's foundation.
Little or nothing is known of Pepys's career at college, but soon after
obtaining the Smith scholarship he got into trouble, and, with a
companion, was admonished for being drunk.
[October 21st, 1653. "Memorandum: that Peapys and Hind were
solemnly admonished by myself and Mr. Hill, for having been
scandalously over-served with drink ye night before. This was done in
the presence of all the Fellows then resident, in Mr. Hill's
chamber.--JOHN WOOD, Registrar." (From the Registrar's-book of
Magdalene College.)]
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."
[These particulars are obtained from an interesting letter from Balthasar
St. Michel to Pepys, dated "Deal, Feb. 8, 1673-4," and printed in "Life,
Journals, and Correspondence of Samuel Pepys," 1841, vol. i., pp.
146-53.]
Alexander St. Michel kept up his character for fecklessness through life,
and took out patents for curing smoking chimneys, purifying water, and
moulding bricks. In 1667 he petitioned the king, asserting that he had
discovered King Solomon's gold and silver mines, and the Diary of the
same date contains a curious commentary upon these visions of

wealth:--
"March 29, 1667. 4s. a week which his (Balty St. Michel's) father
receives of the French church is all the subsistence his father and
mother have, and about; L20 a year maintains them."
As already noted, Pepys was married on