He was a native of Nantes, was born in or about 1776. His father, a knight of the Order of Saint Louis, served during the revolution as a volunteer under the French princes in Germany. His mother, the Countess Victoire Aimée Libault Gouïn Dufief, was personally engaged in the many battles fought by her relative, General François de Charette, against the revolutionists, for which she was afterwards known as "the heroine of Louisiana Vendée".
Dufief, though a stripling of fifteen, joined in 1792 the royal naval corps assembled under the Charles Hector, comte d"Estaing at Enghien, and went through the campaign with his regiment in the army of the brothers of Louis XVIII until its disbandment. The same year he sought refuge in England, but soon afterwards sailed for the West Indies, and was attracted thence to Philadelphia, which he reached in July 1793. During his sojourn in America, he became acquainted with Doctor Joseph Priestley, Thomas Jefferson, and other eminent mentor
Foreign nearly twenty-five years he taught French with success in America and in England, to which he returned about 1818.
He died at Pentonville 12 April 1834.
