This was a common practice of the time among the nobility, who alternated between German and French custom, as they moved about Western Europe during their careers and travels.
Theodore became a superb horseman and studied literature, poetry, astronomy, engineering, and also military artillery strategy and tactics while mastering French, German, Italian, Latin and English.
As Theodore de Pencier was assigned to Prince Frederick's regiment as part the Hessian cavalry of General Baron Friedrich Adolf Riedesel, the young officer was destined to see action in North America during the American Revolution.
In the early summer of 1776, Sir Guy Carleton, the British governor and commander-in-chief in Quebec, tasked General John Burgoyne with driving the invading Americans out of the province and south into New York.
Faced with Burgoyne's 6,000 British troops and Riedesel's 4,000 German mercenaries, the weakened Americans retreated to Sorel at the confluence of the St. Lawrence and Richelieu rivers.
Baroness Riedesel and her entourage travelled by elegant caleche, while the Brunswick Dragoons, short on horses, had to march with their enormous cocked hats, thick coats, leather breeches, and jack boots rising above their knees.
With significant losses and failed manoeuvres on both ends of the Mohawk Valley, Lake Ontario, and the Hudson, Burgoyne surrendered after the Battle of Saratoga in the face of heavy Yankee artillery and more than 14,000 men mustered by Gates.
Officers were put in cramped quarters, with as many as six to a room; Baron Riedesel, his wife and children, initially suffered too, living in small, cold surroundings.
He wrote that his hands were "accustomed only to the use of the sword and the training of horses, too weak to cut down trees and to sell them at a profit quickly and advantageously."
His sound education in mathematics enabled him to apprentice using a borrowed theodolite, a calibrated optical instrument used to determine relative position in surveying, navigation, and meteorology.
He later complained to Governor General Sherbrooke that he had become a surveyor because he had very little money, despite the sacrifices he and his father had made in battle on behalf of the British.
On April 19, shortly after Easter 1824, the remains of de Pencier were placed in a modest grave at Fort William Henry by the Richelieu River in Quebec.
Moments earlier, a British subaltern reached into de Pencier's coffin and removed his sword, a final act of discourtesy to the dead Hessian officer, and probably a reflection of the fact that suicide was then a crime.
: "Buried on this nineteenth day of April one thousand eight hundred twenty four Theodore Pincier Esquire formerly of the German troops in the British Service and late a sworn surveyor of this province."