Alphonse Louis Henri Victor Du Pont de Compiègne was born on 22 July 1846 in Fuligny, a small village in Champagne, near Bar-sur-Aube.

[citation needed] When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870 he immediately returned to France and enlisted as a simple soldier.

When the Paris Commune insurrection broke out in 1871, he sided with the Versailles government and joined the ranks of the Seine Volunteers[fr].

[citation needed] He returned to France in the spring of 1872 and met Aimé Bouvier, to whom he explained his plan to explore the sources of the Ogooué River in French Equatorial Africa.

The Ogooué had been mentioned in the accounts of the explorer Paul Du Chaillu, published in 1859, which whetted the curiosity of Victor.

Victor became the friend of N'Combé, the "Sun King", tribal chief at Adanlinanlago, on the bank of the Ogooué opposite Lambaréné.

Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza followed Victor's footsteps in Gabon, helped by his notebooks, notes and observations, which he picked up in person at the family estate of champagne in Fuligny.

[citation needed] Doctor Georg August Schweinfurth, a German explorer and friend of Victor, offered him the post of secretary general of the Khedival Geographic Society which had just been founded in Cairo.

[citation needed] On the occasion of a ball, on 20 February 1877, a German subject quarreled with him "over geographic questions" and insulted his companion.

Victor deliberately shot over his opponent's head, while the latter lodged a ball behind his shoulder blade that could not be extracted.