Undoubtedly, there were some tensions in this polygynous family, something that is suggested by the fact that Méricane procured an arrêt dated 27 September 1776, towards ensuring that she and Elisabeth would inherit the estate after Georges's death in 1774. By all accounts, however, Saint-Georges enjoyed the childhood privileges of a cherished only son of a wealthy planter, both in Guadeloupe and France. In the summer of 1753, Georges, accompanied by a 'mulatto' valet, Jean Charles, escorted his son Joseph and two of Méricane's nieces to France for their education. They arrived in Bordeaux on Le Bien Aimé on 12  
August 1753 and headed for Angouleme. There Joseph was entrusted to the care of his brother, Pierre, and enrolled in the Collège de Saint-Louis. It cannot be emphasized enough that, by the mid-eighteenth century, there would have been nothing unusual about the presence of polygynous families or their offspring in France more generally, and particularly along the Atlantic coast. It was not accidental that the wealthy indigo planter of colour from Saint-Domingue who would be so influential in the revolutionary years, Julien Raimond, and his wife, settled in Angoumois, near Angouleme, and that Raimond travelled back and forth to Paris from there in his efforts to persuade officials at Versailles of the injustice of new and mounting discriminatory colonial decrees. In this Atlantic region, with its major, decidedly cosmopolitan port cities, populated by sizeable immigrant populations that, for historical reasons, were barely French and crypto-Protestant, people of colour were not unusual. Joseph was not the first 'mulatto' son of a wealthy planter to be schooled in metropolitan France and, it is more than likely that he encountered a diversity of people in his Angoumois years, including but not limited to people of colour.