bosom. Make not the lotus of thy memory Void of its nectar honey. (Translated from the original Bengali by the poet.) His family joined him in 1863, and thereafter they shifted to the much cheaper Versailles, due to the miserable state of their finances. Funds were not arriving from India according to his plans. He was only able to relocate to England in 1865 and study for the bar due to the munificent generosity of Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar. For this, Dutta was to regard Vidyasagar as Dayar Sagar (meaning the ocean of kindness) for as long as he lived. He was admitted to the High Court in Calcutta on his return in February 1867. His family followed him in 1869. His stay in England had left him disillusioned with European culture. He wrote to his friend Bysack from France: Marriage and family Dutta had refused to enter into an arranged marriage which his father had decided for him. He had no respect for that tradition and wanted to break free from the confines of caste-based endogamous marriage. His knowledge of the European tradition convinced him of his choice of marriages made by mutual consent (or love marriages). He was the first Bengali to marry a European or Anglo-Indian woman. While in Madras he married Indo-Scottish-Britton, Rebecca Thompson McTavish, a 17-year-old resident of the Madras Female Orphan Asylum, on 31 July 1848. Dutta assumed the name Michael when the marriage was registered in the baptismal register. They had four children together. He wrote to Bysack in December 1855: Dutta returned from Madras to Calcutta in February 1856, after his father's death (in 1855), abandoning his wife and four children in Madras. No records of his divorce from Rebecca or remarriage have been found. In 1858, he was joined there by a 22-year old of French extraction, Emelia Henrietta Sophie White, the daughter of his colleague at the Madras Male Orphan Asylum. They had two sons, Frederick Michael Milton (23 July 1861 – 11 June 1875) and Albert Napoleon (1869 – 22 August 1909), and a daughter, Henrietta Elizabeth Sermista (1859 – 15 February 1879). A fourth child was stillborn. Their relationship lasted until the end of his life, Henrietta pre-deceasing him by three days, on 26 June 1873. Rebecca died in Madras in July 1892. Only a daughter and a son survived her. The son, McTavish-Dutt, practised as a pleader in