been a Huguenot stronghold and retained a reputation for religious toleration. Emery Soyer and his wife, who are thought to have been Protestants, settled in the town in 1799. Emery had several jobs, one of them as a grocer, and scraped a modest living. Soyer's early life is not well documented. According to his first biographers, François Volant and J. R. Warren, the boy was destined by his parents for the Protestant ministry and was sent to a local seminary at the age of nine. In Volant and Warren's account, Soyer rebelled against the claustrophobic environment of the seminary and deliberately contrived his expulsion by ringing the church bell at midnight, causing general alarm in the town. Later biographers differ about the plausibility of this account: Ruth Brandon (2004) finds the story improbable; Ruth Cowen (2006) does not discount it, but notes that there are no surviving school records for Soyer; Elizabeth Ray, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2011), treats the story as true. In 1821 Soyer was sent to Paris to live with his eldest brother, Philippe, who was a cook. Philippe arranged an apprenticeship for him at a restaurant run by a friend, Georg Rignon, first in the Rue Vivienne, near the Bourse, and later relocated to the Boulevard des Italiens. In 1826 Soyer left to become second chef at Maison Douix, a large restaurant further along the Boulevard des Italiens. Within a year he was promoted to chef de cuisine with a team of twelve chefs beneath him. By the end of the decade Soyer had struck out on his own, providing grand and high-profile banquets in aristocratic households. His career in Paris was halted by the July Revolution in 1830. Sources differ as to whether it was in a freelance capacity or as a newly appointed full-time chef to the French foreign ministry that he was cooking for a banquet given by the French chief minister, Jules de Polignac, when an armed mob broke in. Soyer was unharmed, but in the aftermath of the revolution his association with the fallen Bourbon aristocracy made him persona non grata and unemployable. At the suggestion of his brother Philippe he moved to England. He left behind him a young woman, Adelaide Lamain, and the baby son recently born to them. London By the time of the 1830 revolution in France, Philippe Soyer had been living and working