Vigny, Alfred de

Alfred Victor, Comte de Vigny, was a French author born in the town of Loches near Tours in central France as the son of a veteran of the Seven Years War. In 1799, at the end of the French Revolution, the family moved to Paris where Alfred, the only surviving child of four, grew up as the centre of attention and was educated in the spirit of the Enlightenment. His sixty-year-old father told him endless stories about the family's glorious past while his mother, who was twenty years younger than her husband, brought him up in accordance with the teachings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.