High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Robert Challe (17 August 1659 25 January 1721) was a French colonialist, voyager and writer, although he never published under his own name, which accounts for his obscurity until his re-discovery in the 1970s. His two most well-known works are fr:Les Illustres Françaises, published in The Hague in 1713, and Journal d'un voyage fait aux Indes Orientales, published after his death in 1721. Challe was born in Paris, the youngest of five children of the second marriage of a certain Jean Challe, a petit bourgeois and minor civil servant. He had two brothers and two sisters. He was an intelligent boy and a good scholar, and his life appears to have been comfortable until the death of his father in 1681. The influence of his mother, who seems to have preferred her oldest son, ensured that he was inequitably treated in his father's will, receiving only one tenth of the estate, and he entered into violent dispute with his two older brothers, fought a duel with one of them and injured him. Faced with either imprisonment or exile, he chose the latter, and left for Canada.