[2] At the age of 15,[4] Fréminville was appointed to the 74-gun Intrépide as a midshipman[4] and took part in the Saint-Domingue expedition,[2] in which he witnessed and condemned the massacres perpetrated by General de Rochambeau.

[5] Returned to France in January 1803 on Swiftsure with Pauline Bonaparte and the body of General Leclerc,[4] he was promoted to Ensign, and distinguished himself again in a battle between his gunboat and a British frigate, where he was wounded.

[3] A royalist at heart, he welcomed the Bourbon Restoration, but his career did not accelerate; he served on the fluyt Rhône in the Baltic Sea and the frigate Néréide off Western Africa.

[3] The same year, he pseudonymously authored an "Essay on the physical and moral influence of the female costume",[note 3] in which he stated that female clothes have a delicious effect on the nervous system of a delicate being and make it undergo inner delights unknown to those whose organisation is more coarse[4][note 4] The pseudonym "Caroline de L." that Fréminville used was later interpreted as a hommage to the Creole of the Saintes.

[4] In 1836, he donated a luxurious model of a fictitious galley, Minerve, made by famed modelist Augustin Pic, to the Musée national de la Marine.