In 1783, Jacques Etienne Quevillon married Marie Anne Moisson. He was a twenty-seven-year-old weaver and she was a twenty-eight-year-old spinner, occupations that they appear to have held consistently throughout their marriage. Nineteen months after the wedding, Marie Anne bore a daughter, Marie Anne Felicité. Four and a half years later, she bore a second child, a son named Charles Tranquille. In 1794, the five-year-old Charles Tranquille and his mother died within two weeks of each other, perhaps of a contagious disease, although the parish and civil registers for Auffay never report the cause of death. Less than four months after the death of his wife and son, and with a ten-year-old daughter to care for, Jacques Etienne married again. He was thirty-eight. His new wife, Marie Magdeleine Saunier, was four years his junior and, like Marie Anne Moisson, was a spinner.

Nineteenth-century middle-class observers of peasant life were shocked by the rapidity with which men like Jacques Etienne Quevillon remarried after the death of a spouse. In their eyes, this was proof that peasant marriages were merely economic arrangements, and that no emotional bond existed between husband and wife. Some historians have subscribed to this view and believe that peasant marriage was based purely on financial considerations.