Career
He was appointed maréchal de camp in 1791. He was appointed Governor of the west province of Saint-Domingue(now Haiti) the following year, and twice governor-general. He was eventually a brigadier general.
Previously he had supplied the libretti for at least two one-act operas for which the music was composed by François-Joseph Gossec.
One, Le périgourdin ("The man from Périgord") was an intermède, a between-acts intermezzo that was presented at the private theatre of the prince de Conti at the Château de Chantilly, 7 June 1761. His one-act pastoral comedy Les pêcheurs, ("The Fishermen") was presented to a Parisian public at the Comédie-italienne, 23 April 1766 and repeated 7 July.
His translation of an English novel Histoire de Lucy Wellers, by "Mission Smythies of Colchester" was printed at The Hague in 1766. A Mémoire justificatif pour le marquis de la Salle was printed in 1789.
The Château de Piédefer, Viry-Châtillon, Essonne, near the Seine south of Paris, traditionally attributed to Charles Perrault, is known for its late-seventeenth-century vaulted nymphaeum or grotto encrusted with rock and shellwork in compartments, and an orangery, both listed as Monuments historiques since 1983.
The seventeenth-century architecture of the château was modified in the eighteenth century. A parterre survives, with a water jet in a fountain, in the nineteenth-century wooded landscape park.