Chapter IV: Book I: 1 (1)

Birth of my brothers and sisters--My own birth-Plancoët--I am vowed--Combourg--My father's scheme of education for me--Villeneuve--Lucile--Mesdemoiselles Couppart--I am a bad pupil--The life led by my maternal grandmother and her sister at Plancoët--My uncle, the Comte de Bedée, at Monchoix--I am relieved from my nurse's vow--Holidays--Saint-Malo--Gesril--Hervine Magon--Fight with two ship's lads.

Four years ago, on my return from the Holy Land, I purchased near the little village of Aulnay, in the neighbourhood of Sceaux[2] and Châtenay, a small country-house, lying hidden among wooded hills. The sandy and uneven ground attached to this house consisted of a sort of wild orchard, at the end of which was a ravine and a coppice of chestnut-trees. This narrow space seemed to me fitted to contain my long hopes: _spatio brevi spem longam reseces[3]._ The trees which I have planted here are thriving. They are still so small that I can shade them by placing myself between them and the sun. One day they will give me shade and protect my old age as I have protected their youth. I have selected them, in so far as I could, from the different climes in which I have wandered; they recall my travels and foster other illusions in my heart.

If ever the Bourbons reascend the throne, I will ask from them no greater reward for my loyalty than that they should make me rich enough to add to my fee-simple the skirts of the surrounding woods: I have grown ambitious, and would wish to expand my walks by a few roods. Knight-errant though I be, I have the sedentary tastes of a monk: I doubt whether, since taking up my abode in this retreat, I have thrice set foot without my boundary. If my pines, my fir-trees, my larches, my cedars ever keep their promise, the Vallée-aux-Loups will become a veritable hermitage. When, on the 20th of February 1694,[4] Voltaire saw the light at Châtenay, what was then the appearance of the hill to which the author of the _Génie du Christianisme_ was to retire in 1807?

This spot pleases me; it has taken the place of my paternal acres; I have bought it with the price of my dreams and my vigils; I owe the little wilderness of Aulnay to the vast wilderness of Atala; and I have not, in order to acquire this refuge, imitated the American planter and despoiled the Indian of the Two Floridas[5]. I am attached to my trees; I have addressed elegies to them, sonnets, odes. There is not one of them which I have not tended with my own hands, which I have not rid of the worm attached to its roots, the caterpillar clinging to its leaves; I know them all by their names, as though they were my children: they are my family, I have no other, and I hope to die in their midst.

Here, I have written the _Martyrs_, the _Abencerages_, the _Itinéraire_ and _Moïse_; what shall I do now during these autumn evenings? This 4th day of October 1811, the anniversary of my saint's-day[6] and of my entrance into Jerusalem,[7] tempts me to commence the history of my life. The man who today is endowing France with the empire of the world only so that he may trample her under foot, the man whose genius I admire and whose despotism I abhor, that man surrounds me with his tyranny as it were with a new solitude; but though he may crush the present, the past defies him, and I remain free in all that precedes his glory.

The greater part of my feelings have remained buried in the recesses of my soul, or are displayed in my works only as applied to imaginary beings. To-day, while I still regret, without pursuing, my illusions, I will reascend the acclivity of my happier years: these Memoirs shall be a shrine erected to the clearness of my remembrances.

[Sidenote: My birth and ancestry.]

Let us commence, then, and speak first of my family. This is essential, because the character of my father depended in a great measure upon his position and, in its turn, exercised a great influence upon the nature of my ideas, by determining the manner of my education[8].

*

I am of noble birth. In my opinion I have improved the hazard of my cradle and retained that firmer love of liberty which belongs principally to the aristocracy whose last hour has struck. Aristocracy has three ages: the age of superiority, the age of privilege, the age of vanity; issuing from the first, it degenerates in the second to become extinguished in the third.

He who is curious for information concerning my family may consult Moréri's[9] Dictionary, the different Histories of Brittany by d'Argentré[10], Dom Lobineau[11], Dom Morice, Père Du Paz' _Histoire généalogique de plusieurs maisons illustres de Bretagne_, Toussaint de Saint-Luc, Le Borgne, and lastly Père Anselme's _Histoire des grands officiers de la Couronne._[12]

My proofs of descent were made out by Chérin[13], for the admission of my sister Lucile as a canoness of the Chapter of the Argentière, whence she was to be transferred to that of Remiremont. They were reproduced for my presentation to Louis XVI., again for my affiliation to the Order of Malta, and lastly, when my brother was presented to the same unfortunate Louis XVI.

My name was first written "Brien," and then "Briant" and "Briand," following the invasion of French spelling. Guillaume le Breton says "Castrum-Briani." There is not a French name that does not present these literal variations. What is the spelling of Du Guesclin?

About the commencement of the eleventh century, the Briens gave their name to an important Breton castle, and this castle became the burgh of the Barony of Chateaubriand. The Chateaubriand arms at first consisted of fir-cones with the motto, _Je sème l'or._ Geoffrey Baron of Chateaubriand accompanied St Louis to Palestine. He was taken prisoner at the battle of the Mansourah[14], but returned, and his wife Sybil died of joy and surprise at seeing him. St. Louis, in reward for his services, granted to him and his heirs, in lieu of his old arms, an escutcheon gules, strewn with fleur-de-lis or: "_Cui et ejus hæredibus_" a cartulary of the Priory of Bérée bears witness, "_sanctus Ludovicus turn Francorum rex, propter ejus probitatem in armis, flores lilii auri, loco pomorum pini auri, contulit._"

[Sidenote: My proofs of nobility.]

The Chateaubriands were divided, soon after their origin, into three branches: the first, that of the Barons of Chateaubriand, was the stock of the two others, and commenced in the year 1000 in the person of Thiern, son of Brien, grandson of Alan III., Count or Chief of Brittany; the second was called the Lords[15] of the Roches Baritaut, or of the Lion d'Angers; the third bore the title of Lords[16] of Beaufort.

When the line of the Lords of Beaufort became extinct in the person of Dame Renée, one Christopher II., of a collateral branch of that line, came into possession of the estate of the Guerrande in Morbihan[17]. At this period, the middle of the seventeenth century, great confusion prevailed in the order of the nobility. Names and titles had been usurped. Louis XIV. ordered a visitation, so that each might be reinstated in his rights. Christopher, upon giving proofs of his ancient nobility, was confirmed in his title and in the ownership of his arms, by judgment of the Chamber instituted at Rennes for the reforming of the nobility of Brittany. This judgment was issued on the 16th of September 1669, and ran as follows:

"Judgment of the Chamber instituted by the King for the
reforming of the nobility in the Province of Brittany,
delivered the 16th of September 1669: between the King's
Attorney-General and M. Christophe de Chateaubriand, Sieur
de La Guerrande; which declares the said Christophe to
issue from an ancient noble house, permits him to take the
quality of knight, and confirms his right to bear arms gules
strewn with fleur-de-lys or without number, and this after
production by him of his authentic titles, from which it
appears, &c, &c. The said judgment signed Malescot."

This judgment declares that Christophe de Chateaubriand de La Guerrande was descended in the direct line from the Chateaubriands, Lords of Beaufort; the Lords of Beaufort were connected through historical evidences with the first Barons of Chateaubriand. The Chateaubriands de Villeneuve, du Plessis and de Combourg were younger branches of the Chateaubriands de La Guerrande, as is proved by the descent of Amaury, brother of Michel, the said Michel being the son of the Christophe de La Guerrande whose descent was confirmed by the above-quoted decree of the reforming of the nobility of 16 September 1669.

After my presentation to Louis XVI., my brother proposed to increase my portion as a younger son by endowing me with some of those benefices known as _bénéfices simples._ There was but one practical means of doing this, since I was a layman and a soldier, and that was to have me received into the Order of Malta. My brother sent my proofs to Malta, and soon after, he presented a petition, in my name, to the Chapter of the Grand Priory of Aquitaine, held at Poitiers, with a view to the appointing of a commission to declare urgency. M. Pontois was at the time archivist, vice-chancellor and genealogist of the Order of Malta at the Priory.

The president of the Chapter was Louis Joseph des Escotais, _bailli_, Grand Prior of Aquitaine, having with him the Bailli de Freslon, the Chevalier de La Laurencie, the Chevalier de Murat, the Chevalier de Lanjamet, the Chevalier de La Bourdonnaye-Montluc and the Chevalier du Bouëtiez. The petition was allowed at the sittings of the 9th, 10th, and 11th of September 1789. It is stated, in the terms of admission of the "Memorial," that I deserved the favour which I solicited "by more than one title," and that "considerations of the greatest weight" made me worthy of the satisfaction which I claimed.

And all this took place after the fall of the Bastille[18], on the eve of the scenes of the 6th of October 1789[19], and of the removal of the Royal Family to Paris. And at its sitting of the 7th of August in this same year 1789, the National Assembly had abolished titles of nobility! How could the knights, the examiners of my proofs, find that I deserved "by more than one title the favour which I solicited" and so forth, I, who was nothing more than a petty sub-lieutenant of Foot, unknown, without credit, interest or fortune?

My brother's eldest son (I add this in 1831 to my original text, written in 1811), the Comte Louis de Chateaubriand, married Mademoiselle d'Orglandes, by whom he had five daughters and one son, the latter called Geoffroy. Christian, Louis' younger brother, the great-grandson and godson of M. de Malesherbes, to whom he bore a striking resemblance, served with distinction in Spain in 1823 as a captain of the Dragoons of the Guard. He became a Jesuit in Rome. The Jesuits supply the place of solitude in proportion as the latter vanishes from the earth. Christian died recently at Chieri, near Turin: old and ailing as I am, I should have preceded him; but his virtues summoned him to Heaven before me, who have yet many faults to deplore.

In the division of the family patrimony, Christian had received as his share the property of Malesherbes, and Louis the estate of Combourg. Christian did not look upon an equal division as just, and on retiring from the world, determined to disburden himself of a property which did not belong to him and restore it to his elder brother.

To judge from my parchments, it would but rest with myself if I inherited the infatuation of my father and brother, and believed myself to represent a younger branch of the Dukes of Brittany, descending from Thiern, grandson of Alan III.

[Sidenote: Royal alliances.]

These Chateaubriands aforesaid had twice mixed their blood with the Blood Royal of England, Geoffrey IV. of Chateaubriand having married as his second wife Agnes of Laval, grand-daughter of the Count of Anjou and of Maud, daughter of Henry I., while Margaret of Lusignan, widow of the King of England and grand-daughter of Louis the Fat[20], married Geoffrey V., twelfth Baron of Chateaubriand. With respect to the Royal House of Spain, we find Brien, a younger brother of the ninth Baron of Chateaubriand, who would seem to have married Joan, daughter of Alphonsus, King of Aragon. It is stated, moreover, in so far as the great families of France are concerned, that Edward of Rohan took Margaret of Chateaubriand to wife; and again that a Croï married Charlotte of Chateaubriand. Tinténiac, the victor of the Battle of the Thirty[21], and Du Guesclin, the Constable, allied themselves with our three branches. Tiphaine Du Guesclin, grand-daughter of Bertrand's brother, made over the property of the Plessis-Bertrand to Brien of Chateaubriand, her cousin and heir. In treaties, Chateaubriands are given as sureties for the peace to the Kings of France, to Clisson[22], to the Baron of Vitré. The Dukes of Brittany send records of their assizes to the Chateaubriands. The Chateaubriands become grand officers of the Crown and _illustres_ in the Court of Nantes; they receive commissions to defend the safety of their province against the English. Brien I. is present at the Battle of Hastings: he was the son of Eudon, Count of Penthièvre. Guy of Chateaubriand is one of the lords whom Arthur of Brittany appoints to accompany his son upon his embassy to the Pope in 1309.

I should never come to an end if I finished stating all that of which I intended to give only a brief summary: the note[23] which I have at last determined to write, from consideration for my two nephews, who doubtless do not hold these bygone trifles as cheaply as I do, will supply the place of my omissions in the text. Still, nowadays we go too much to the other extreme; it has become the custom to declare that one comes of a stock liable to villain service, that one has the honour to be the son of a man bound to the soil. Are these declarations as proud as they are philosophical? Is it not taking the side of the strongest? Are the marquises, the counts, the barons of the present day, who have neither privileges nor furrows, three-fourths of whom are starving, blackening one another, refusing to recognize each other, mutually contesting each other's birth: are these nobles, whose very names are denied them or only allowed with reserve, able to inspire any fear?

For the rest, I ask pardon for being obliged to stoop to this puerile recital, in order to account for my father's dominant passion, which forms the key to the drama of my youth. As for myself, I neither boast nor complain of the old or the new society. If in the first I was the Chevalier or the Vicomte de Chateaubriand, in the second I am François de Chateaubriand: I prefer my name to my title. Monsieur my father would readily, like a certain mighty land-owner of the Middle Ages, have called God "the gentleman on high" and surnamed Nicodemus (the Nicodemus of the Gospels) "a holy gentleman." And now, passing over my immediate progenitor, let us come from Christopher, feudal lord of the Guerrande, descending in the direct line from the Barons of Chateaubriand, to me, François, lord without vassals or money of the Vallée-aux-Loups.

To trace backwards the line of the Chateaubriands, consisting, as it did, of three branches: after the two first had failed, the third, that of the Lords of Beaufort, represented by a branch, the Chateaubriands of the Guerrande, grew poor, as the inevitable result of the law of the land; the eldest sons of the nobility received two-thirds of the property, by virtue of the custom of Brittany, while the younger sons divided among all of them one-third only of the paternal inheritance. The degeneration of the frail stock of the latter worked with a rapidity which became the greater as they married; and as the same distribution into two-thirds and one-third existed in the case of their children, these younger sons of younger sons soon came to dividing a pigeon, a rabbit, a duck or two, and a hound, although they did not cease to be "high knights and mighty lords" of a dove-cote, a toad-pool and a rabbit-warren. In the old noble families we see a number of younger sons; we follow them during two or three generations, and then they disappear, descending gradually to the plough or absorbed by the labouring classes, no man knowing what has become of them.

[Sidenote: My father's family.]

The head in name and blazon of my family at the commencement of the eighteenth century was Alexis de Chateaubriand, Seigneur de La Guerrande, son of Michel, the said Michel having a brother named Amaury. Michel was the son of the Christophe confirmed in his descent from the Lords of Beaufort and the Barons of Chateaubriand in the judgment above-quoted. Alexis de La Guerrande was a widower and a confirmed drunkard, spent his days in rioting with his maid-servants, and used his most precious family documents as covers for his butter-jars.

Contemporary with this head in name and blazon lived his cousin François, son of Amaury, Michel's younger brother. François, born 19 February 1683, owned the small lordships of the Touches and the Villeneuve. He married, on the 27th of August 1713, Pétronille Claude Lamour, Dame de Lanjégu, by whom he had four sons: François Henri, René (my father), Pierre Seigneur du Plessis and Joseph Seigneur du Parc. My grandfather, François, died 28 March 1729; in my grand-mother, whom I knew in my childhood, lingered a beautiful expression of the eyes, which seemed to smile in the shade of her many years. At the time of her husband's death, she was living in the manor of the Villeneuve, in the neighbourhood of Dinan. My grandmother's whole fortune did not exceed 5,000 livres a year, of which her eldest son took 3,333 livres, leaving 1,666 livres a year to be divided among the three younger sons, of which sum the eldest again first took the largest share.

To crown the misfortune, my grandmother's plans were thwarted by the characters of her sons: the eldest, François Henri, to whom the magnificent heritage of the lordship of the Villeneuve had fallen, refused to marry and became a priest; but instead of seeking the benefices which his name would have procured for him, and with which he could have supported his brothers, prompted by pride and indifference, he asked for nothing. He buried himself in a country vicarage, and was successively Rector of Saint-Launeuc and of Madrignac in the Diocese of Saint-Malo. He had a passion for poetry; I have seen a goodly number of his verses. The jovial character of this sort of high-born Rabelais, the cult of the Muses practised by this Christian priest in his presbytery, aroused no little interest He gave away all he possessed and died insolvent.

My father's fourth brother, Joseph, went to Paris and shut himself up in a library: every year his younger son's portion of 416 livres was sent to him. He lived unknown amidst his books, occupying himself with historical research. During his life, which was a short one, he wrote to his mother on each first of January: the only sign of existence he ever gave. Strange destiny! There you have my two uncles, one a man of erudition, the other a poet; my elder brother wrote agreeable verse; one of my sisters, Madame de Farcy, had a real talent for poetry; another of my sisters, the Comtesse Lucile, a canoness, might have become known through a few admirable pages; I myself have blackened no little paper. My brother died on the scaffold, my two sisters quitted a life of pain after languishing in the prisons; my two uncles did not leave enough to pay for the four boards of their coffin; literature has caused my joys and my sorrows, and I do not despair, God willing, of ending my days in the alms-house.

My grandmother, having exhausted her means in doing something for her eldest and her youngest sons, was unable to do anything for the two others, René, my father, and Pierre, my uncle. This family, which had "strewn gold," according to its motto, looked out from its small manor upon the rich abbeys which it had founded and in which its ancestors lay entombed. It had presided over the States of Brittany, by virtue of possessing one of the nine baronies; it had witnessed with its signature the treaties of sovereigns, had served as surety to Clisson, and would not have had sufficient credit to obtain an ensigncy for the heir of its name.

One resource was left to the poor Breton nobles, the Royal Navy. An endeavour was made to use this on behalf of my father; but he must first go to Brest, live there, pay masters, buy his uniform, arms, books, mathematical instruments: how were all these expenses to be met? The brevet applied for to the Minister of Marine was not sent, for want of a protector to solicit its despatch: the Lady of Villeneuve sickened with grief.

It was then that my father gave the first sign of that decision of character for which I have known him. He was about fifteen years of age; observing his mother's distress, he approached the bed on which she lay, and said:

"I will no longer be a burden to you."

Thereupon my grandmother began to weep: I have heard my father describe the scene a score of times.

"René," said she, "what do you wish to do? Till your fields."

"They will not keep us; let me go away."

"Well, then," said the mother, "go where God wills that you should go."

She embraced the child with sobs. That same evening my father left the maternal farm and arrived at Dinan, where one of our kinswomen gave him a letter of recommendation to an inhabitant of Saint-Malo. The orphan adventurer was taken as a volunteer on board an armed schooner, which set sail a few days later.

[Sidenote: My father's career.]

At that time, the little commonwealth of Saint-Malo alone maintained the honour of the French ensign at sea. The schooner joined the fleet which the Cardinal de Fleury was dispatching to the assistance of Stanislaus, who was besieged at Dantzig by the Russians. There my father landed, and was present at the memorable combat which 1,500 Frenchmen, commanded by the Breton de Bréhan, Comte de Plélo[24], delivered, on the 29th of May 1734, against 40,000 Muscovites under Munich[25]. De Bréhan, diplomatist, warrior and poet, was killed; my father was twice wounded. He returned to France, and embarked once more. Wrecked upon the Spanish coast, he was attacked and stripped by robbers in Galicia, took a passage on board ship to Bayonne, and landed once again beneath the paternal roof. His courage and his orderly conduct had brought him into notice. He went to the West Indies, made money in the colonies, and laid the foundations of a new fortune for his family.

My grandmother entrusted to her son René the care of her son Pierre, M. de Chateaubriand du Plessis[26] whose son, Armand de Chateaubriand, was shot, by order of Bonaparte, on Good Friday[27] 1809. He was one of the last of the French nobles to die for the cause of the monarchy. My father took charge of his brother's fate, although the habit of suffering had endowed him with a sternness of character that lasted through his life. _Non ignara mali_ is not always a true saying: unhappiness has its harsh as well as its gentle side.

M. de Chateaubriand was tall and spare; he had an aquiline nose and thin, pale lips; his eyes were deep-set, small, and of a bluish or sea-green color, like the eyes of lions or of the barbarians of olden time. I have never seen an expression like theirs: when inflamed with anger, each flashing pupil seemed to shoot out and strike you like a bullet.

My father was governed by one sole passion, that of his name. His general condition was one of deep sadness, which increased with age, and of a silence from which he issued only in fits of anger. Avaricious in the hope of restoring to his family its pristine splendour, haughty of demeanour with the nobles at the States of Brittany, harsh with his dependants at Combourg, taciturn, despotic and threatening at home, the feeling which the sight of him inspired was one of fear. Had he lived until the Revolution, and had he been younger, he would have played a great part, or got himself massacred in his castle. He was certainly possessed of genius: I have no doubt that, at the head of an administration or an army, he would have been a man out of the ordinary.

He first thought of marriage on returning from America. Born on the 23rd of September 1718, he was thirty-five years of age when, on the 3rd of July 1753, he married Apolline Jeanne Suzanne de Bedée, born 7 April 1726, and daughter of Messire Ange Annibal Comte de Bedée, Seigneur de La Bouëtardais. He took up his residence with her at Saint-Malo, within seven or eight leagues of which both of them had been born, so that their house commanded the horizon under which they had first seen the light. My maternal grandmother, Marie Anne de Ravenel de Boisteilleul, Dame de Bedée, born at Rennes on the 16th of October 1698, had been brought up at Saint-Cyr during the last years of Madame de Maintenon: her education had left its mark upon her daughters.

My mother was endowed with great wit and intelligence, and with a prodigious imagination; her mind had been formed by the works of Fénelon, Racine, Madame de Sévigné, and stored with anecdotes of the Court of Louis XIV.; she knew the whole of _Cyrus_[28] by heart. Apolline de Bedée was dark, short and ill-favoured, with large features; the elegance of her manners, the vivacity of her temperament, formed a contrast with my father's stiffness and calm. Loving society as much as he loved solitude, as humoursome and animated as he was cold and unimpassioned, she had no tastes but what were opposed to her husband's. The antagonism which she encountered saddened her naturally gay and light-hearted disposition. Obliged to hold her tongue when she would have wished to speak, she made amends to herself by a kind of clamorous melancholy broken with sighs which alone interrupted my father's silent gloom. For piety my mother was an angel.

My mother was brought to bed at Saint-Malo of an eldest son, who died in the cradle and was christened Geoffroy, like almost all the first-born of my family. This son was followed by another and by two daughters, none of whom lived more than a few months.

[Sidenote: My birth and baptism.]

These four children died of an extravasation of blood on the brain. At last my mother bore a third son, who was named Jean-Baptiste: it was he who later married M. de Malesherbes' grand-daughter. After Jean-Baptiste came four daughters: Marie-Anne, Bénigne, Julie and Lucile, all four endowed with rare beauty; the two eldest alone survived the storms of the Revolution. Beauty, that serious trifle, remains when all the rest has passed away. I was the last of the ten children. Probably my four sisters owed their existence to my father's desire to assure the perpetuation of his name through the arrival of a second boy; I resisted, I had an aversion to life.

Here is my baptismal certificate[29]:

"Extract from the civil register of the Commune of Saint-Malo
for the year 1768.

"François René de Chateaubriand, son of René de Chateaubriand
and of Pauline Jeanne Suzanne de Bedée, his wife, born 4
September 1768, baptized on the following day by us Pierre
Henri Nouail, grand-vicar of the Bishop of Saint-Malo.
Godfather, Jean-Baptiste de Chateaubriand, his brother, and
godmother, Françoise-Gertrude de Contades, who sign with the
father. Thus signed on the register: Contades de Plouër,
Jean-Baptiste de Chateaubriand, Brignon de Chateaubriand, de
Chateaubriand, and Nouail, vicar-general[30]."

It will be observed that I have made a mistake in my Works: I say that I was born on the 4th of October[31] and not on the 4th of September; my Christian names are François René and not François Auguste[32].

The house in which my parents were then living at Saint-Malo stands in a dark and narrow street called the Rue des Juifs[33]: it has now been turned into an inn[34]. The room in which my mother was confined overlooks a bare portion of the city wall, and from the windows one can contemplate an endless expanse of sea, which breaks upon the rocks. My god-father, as appears from my baptismal certificate, was my brother, and my godmother the Comtesse de Plouër, daughter of the Marshal de Contades[35]. I was almost dead when I first saw the light. The roaring of the waves, upheaved by a squall which heralded the autumnal equinox, deadened my cries: I have often been told these details; their sadness has never been erased from my memory. A day seldom passes on which, reflecting on what I have been, I do not see again in thought the rock upon which I was born, the room in which my mother inflicted life upon me, the tempest whose sound first lulled me to sleep, the unfortunate brother who gave me a name which I have nearly always dragged through misfortune. Heaven seemed to unite these several circumstances in order to lay within my cradle a symbol of my destiny.

On leaving my mother's breast I underwent my first exile: I was banished to Plancoët, a pretty village situated between Dinan, Saint-Malo and Lamballe. My mother's only brother, the Comte de Bedée, had built a house near the village, to which he gave the name of Monchoix. My maternal grand-mother's property stretched from this neighbourhood to the market-town of Courseul, the Curiosolites of Cæsar's Commentaries. My grandmother, since many years a widow, lived with her sister, Mademoiselle de Boisteilleul, in a hamlet divided from Plancoët by a bridge, and known as the Abbaye, from a Benedictine abbey dedicated to Our Lady of Nazareth.

[Sidenote: My nurse's vow.]

My nurse was sterile; another poor Christian took me to her breast. She vowed me to the patron of the hamlet, Our Lady of Nazareth, and promised that I should wear blue and white in her honor for seven years. I had lived but a few hours, and already the weight of years was marked upon my brow. Why did they not let me die? God in His wisdom granted to the prayer of humbleness and innocence the preservation of a life for which a vain renown was lying in wait.

This vow of the Breton peasant woman is no longer in the spirit of the age: yet nothing can be more touching than the intervention of a Divine Mother coming between Heaven and the child and sharing the terrestrial mother's solicitude.

After three years I was brought back to Saint-Malo. Already seven years had elapsed since my father had recovered the domain of Combourg. He wished to gain possession of the estates where his ancestors had lived and died; and unable to treat for the purchase of the manor of Beaufort, which had passed to the Goyon family, or for the barony of Chateaubriand, which had fallen into the hands of the House of Condé, he turned his attention to Combourg, which is spelt "Combour"[36] in Froissart, and which has been held by various branches of my family through their inter-marriages with the Coëtquens. Combourg served as a defense to Brittany in the Norman and English marches: it was built in 1016 by Junken, Bishop of Dol; the great tower dates to 1100. The Marshal de Duras[37], who held Combourg by right of his wife, Maclovie de Coëtquen, whose mother was a Chateaubriand, came to terms with my father. The Marquis du Hallay[38], an officer in the Mounted Grenadiers of the Royal Guards, perhaps too well known for his valor, is the last of the Coëtquen Chateaubriands: M. du Hallay has a brother. The same Maréchal de Duras, in his quality as our ally, subsequently presented my brother and myself to Louis XVI.

I was intended for the Royal Navy: a distaste for Court life was natural to any Breton, and particularly to my father. This feeling was strengthened in him by the aristocratic character of our States.

When I was brought home to Saint-Malo, my father was at Combourg, my brother at Saint-Brieuc College; my four sisters were living with my mother. All the latter's affections were centered upon her eldest son: not that she did not love her other children, but she showed a blind preference for the young Comte de Combourg. True, I had, as a boy, as the youngest-born, as the "chevalier," as I was called, certain privileges not shared by my sisters; but, upon the upshot, I was left to the care of the servants. Moreover, my mother, full of intelligence and virtue, was largely taken up with social claims and religious duties. The Comtesse de Plouër, my godmother, was her intimate friend; she also saw Maupertuis'[39] family and the Abbé Trublet's[40]. She loved politics, excitement, society: for people talked politics at Saint-Malo like the monks in the Cedron hollow[41]; and she threw herself with ardor into the La Chalotais[42] affair. She would bring home with her a cross humour, an absent-mindedness, a spirit of parsimony, which at first prevented one from recognising her admirable qualities. She was methodical, and showed no method in the management of her children; generous, and appeared avaricious; gentle, yet ever scolding: my father was the terror of the servants, my mother their scourge.

Such were the dispositions of my parents, whence sprang the earliest feelings of my life. I attached myself to the woman who took care of me, an excellent creature called Villeneuve, whose name I write with a movement of gratitude and with tears in my eyes. Villeneuve was a sort of superintendent of the household; she carried me in her arms, gave me, by stealth, anything she could come across, wiped away my tears, kissed me, pushed me into a corner, took me out, and constantly muttering: "There's one who won't grow up proud, who has a good heart, who does not snub poor people! Here, little fellow," she would stuff me with sugar and wine.

[Sidenote: My sister Lucile.]

Soon my childish affection for Villeneuve was controlled by a worthier friendship. Lucile, my fourth sister, was two years older than I[43]. Neglected as the youngest, she was given none save her sisters' left-off clothes to wear. Imagine a little thin girl, too tall for her age, with loose-jointed arms, shy, speaking with difficulty, and unable to learn a thing; dress her in a frock taken from a child of a different size and shape; confine her chest in a quilted corset the gores of which cut wounds into her ribs; hold up her neck with an iron collar cased in brown velvet; dress her hair back upon the top of her head, fasten it with a cap of black stuff, and you see before you the wretched object that struck my eyes on returning to the paternal roof. No one would have suspected in the puny Lucile the talent and beauty with which she was one day to shine.

She was given me as a plaything; I did not abuse my power; instead of submitting her to my will, I became her defender. She and I were taken every morning to the sisters Couppart, two hunch-backed old women dressed in black, who taught children to read. Lucile read very badly; I still worse. She was scolded; I scratched the sisters' faces; great complaints were carried to my mother. I began to pass for a ne'er-do-well, a rebel, an idler, in short, an ass. These ideas sank into my parents' heads: my father said that all the Chevaliers de Chateaubriand had been hare-hunters, drunkards, and brawlers. My mother sighed and grumbled when she saw the disordered condition of my jacket. Child though I was, my father's remark revolted me; when my mother crowned her remonstrances with a panegyric on my brother, whom she called a Cato, a hero, I felt inclined to do all the ill that they seemed to expect of me.

My writing-master, M. Desprès, who wore a pig-tail, was no more satisfied with me than were my parents; he was eternally making me copy, from a slip in his own writing, the following couplet, which I came to detest, not by reason of any error of construction that it may contain:

C'est à vous, mon esprit, à qui je veux parler:
Vous avez des défauts que je ne puis celer[44].

He accompanied his reprimands with cuffs in my neck, calling me _tête d'achôcre_: did he mean ἀχὼρ[45]? I do not know what a _tête d'achôcre_ is, but I take it to be something frightful.

Saint-Malo is a mere rock. Originally rising from the middle of a salt marsh, it became an island in 709 through an incursion of the sea, which hollowed out the gulf and set Mont Saint-Michel amid the waves. Nowadays the rock of Saint-Malo is attached to the mainland only by a causeway poetically designated as the Sillon, or Furrow. The Sillon is on one side assaulted by the open sea, and on the other washed by the flowing tide, which turns to enter the harbour. In 1730 it was almost entirely destroyed by a storm. At ebb-tide the harbour is dry, displaying on its edge east and north of the sea a beach of the most beautiful sand. It is then possible to walk round my paternal nest. Near and far are strewn rocks, forts, uninhabited islets: the Fort-Royal, the Conchée, Césembre, and the Grand-Bé, where my tomb will be. I unwittingly made a good choice: _bé_, in Breton, means tomb.

At the end of the Furrow, a Calvary stands upon a sandy knoll jutting out into the open sea. This knoll is called the Hoguette; it is crowned with an old gallows: we used to play puss-in-the-corner between its posts, disputing their possession with the birds of the sea-shore. It was not, however, without a certain sense of fright that we stopped in that place.

There, too, are the Miels, downs on which the sheep used to graze; to the right are meadows below Paramé, the posting-road to Saint-Servan, a Calvary, and wind mills standing on rising ground, like those on Achilles' Tomb at the entrance to the Hellespont.

I reached my seventh year; my mother took me to Plancoët, to be released from my nurse's vow; we stayed at my grandmother's. If ever I have known happiness, it was certainly in that house.

[Sidenote: My grandmother.]

My grandmother lived in the Rue du Hameau-de-l'Abbaye, in a house whose gardens ran terrace-wise into a dale, at the bottom of which was a spring surrounded by willows. Madame de Bedée could no longer walk, but with this exception she suffered from none of the inconveniences attendant upon her age. She was a pleasant old woman, fat, white-haired, neat, with the grand air and fine and noble manners. She wore old-fashioned plaited gowns and a head-dress of black lace fastened under her chin. Her mind was cultivated, her conversation grave, her mood was serious. She was cared for by her sister, who resembled her only in kind-heartedness. Mademoiselle de Boisteilleul was a little lean person, sprightly, talkative, addicted to raillery. She had been in love with a certain Comte de Trémigon, and the said count, after becoming engaged to her, had broken his promise. My great-aunt had consoled herself by singing her love, for she was poetically inclined. I remember often hearing her hum, in snuffling fashion, with her glasses on her nose, while embroidering double-rowed ruffles for her sister, an apologue commencing:

Un épervier aimait une fauvette
Et, ce dit-on, il en était aimé[46],

which I always thought strange for a sparrow-hawk.

The song ended with this refrain:

Ah! Trémigon, la fable est-elle obscure?
Ture, lure[47].

How many things in this world end, like my aunt's love, in "Derry down!"

My grandmother left the housekeeping to my sister. She dined at eleven o'clock in the morning, took her _siesta_, woke up at one; she was carried down the garden terraces and placed under the willows near the spring, where she sat knitting, surrounded by her sister, her children, and grandchildren. At that time old age was a distinction; nowadays it is an encumbrance. At four o'clock, my grandmother was carried back to her drawing-room; Pierre, the man-servant, set out a card-table; Mademoiselle de Boisteilleul knocked with the tongs against the back of the fire-place, and a few minutes later three other old maids would walk in, who had come from the next house in obedience to my aunt's summons.

These three sisters were called the Demoiselles Vildéneux[48]; they were the daughters of a poor gentleman, and instead of dividing his slender inheritance, they had enjoyed it in common, had never left one another, had never been out of their natal village. They had been intimate with my grandmother since childhood, lived next door to her, and came every day, at the preconcerted signal in the chimney, to make up their friend's party at quadrille. The game began; the good ladies quarrelled; it was the only incident in their lives, the only moment that spoiled the evenness of their temper. At eight o'clock, supper restored their serenity. Often my uncle de Bedée[49], with his son and his three daughters, would be present at my grandmother's supper. The latter would tell a thousand stories of the old days; my uncle, in his turn, would describe the battle of Fontenoy, at which he was present, and crown his boasting with stories which were a little free and which made the worthy spinsters die with laughing. At nine o'clock, supper over, the servants entered; all went on their knees, and Mademoiselle de Boisteilleul said prayers aloud. At ten o'clock all in the house slept, except my grand-mother, who made her waiting-woman read to her till one in the morning.

This society, which was the first I saw in my life, was also the first to disappear from my eyes. I saw death enter that abode of peace and bliss, making it gradually lonely, closing first one room and then another which were never reopened. I saw my grandmother obliged to forego her quadrille, for want of her accustomed partners; I saw the number of her constant friends diminish until the day came when my grand-mother was the last to fall. She and her sister had promised to call each other so soon as one had preceded the other; they kept their word, and Madame de Bedée survived Mademoiselle de Boisteilleul but a few months. I am perhaps the only man living that knows that these persons existed. Twenty times since that period I have made the same remark; twenty times have societies been formed and dissolved around me. The impossibility of long duration in human relations, the profound forgetfulness that pursues us, the invincible silence that takes possession of our tomb and spreads thence over our house, constantly recall me to the necessity of isolation. Any hand will serve to give us the glass of water which we may need in the fever preceding death. Ah, that it may not be too dear to us! For how can one forsake without despair the hand which he has covered with kisses, and which he would like to hold to his heart for ever?

[Sidenote: The Bedée family.]

The Comte de Bedée's house[50] was a league away from Plancoët, in a high and cheerful position. Everything about it breathed gladness: my uncle's gaiety was inexhaustible. He had three daughters, Caroline, Marie and Flore, and one son, the Comte de La Bouëtardais, a counsellor to the Parliament, all of whom shared his light-heartedness. Monchoix was filled with cousins from the neighbourhood; they made music, danced, hunted, and revealed from morning till night. My aunt, Madame de Bedée[51], who saw my uncle gaily squandering his capital and his income, was very properly vexed; but no one listened to her, and her ill-humour but increased the good-humour of her family, the more so as my aunt herself displayed a number of eccentricities: she always had a great snarling hound lying in her lap, and was followed by a tame boar, which filled the house with its grunts. When I came from my father's house, so sombre and so silent, to this house of noise and merry-making, I felt myself in a genuine paradise. The contrast became more striking when my family were settled in the country: the change from Combourg to Monchoix was a change from the wilderness to the world, from the castle-keep of a mediæval baron to the villa of a Roman prince.

On Ascension Day 1775, I set out from my grandmother's house to go to Our Lady of Nazareth, accompanied by my mother, my aunt de Boisteilleul, my uncle de Bedée and his children, my nurse, and my foster-brother. I wore a white surtout, white shoes, gloves, and hat, and a blue silk sash. We went up to the Abbaye at ten o'clock in the morning. The convent, which stood by the road-side, derived an appearance of age from a quincunx of elms dating back to John V. of Brittany[52]. The quincunx led to the cemetery; it was only through the region of the tombstones that the Christian could reach the church: it is death which admits to the presence of God.

The monks were already seated in their stalls; the altar was lighted with a multitude of candles; lamps hung from the different arches: Gothic edifices offer successive distances and, as it were, horizons. The bedels met me at the door, in state, and conducted me to the choir. Three seats had been prepared; I sat down upon the middle one, my nurse placed herself on my left, my foster-mother on my right.

The mass commenced; at the Offertory, the celebrant turned to me and read some prayers; after which my white clothes were taken off and hung as an _ex voto_ beneath a picture of the Virgin. They then dressed me in a violet-coloured frock. The Prior delivered a discourse upon the efficacy of vows; he recalled the history of the Baron of Chateaubriand who had gone to the East with St Louis; he told me that perhaps I, too, should go to Palestine and visit that Virgin of Nazareth to whom I owed my life, thanks to the prayers of the poor, which were always powerful with God. This monk, who told me the history of my family as Dante's grandfather told him the history of his ancestors, might also, like Cacciaguida, have added to it by predicting my exile[53].

Since the Benedictine's exhortation, I always dreamt of the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and I ended by accomplishing it.

I was consecrated to religion; the wardrobe of my innocence has lain upon its altars: it is not my garments that should today be hung within its temples, but my misfortunes.

I was taken back to Saint-Malo. Saint-Malo is not the Aleth of the _Notitia Imperii_: Aleth was better placed by the Romans in what is now the suburb of Saint-Servan, in the military port known as Solidor, at the mouth of the Rance. Facing Aleth was a rock, _est in conspectu Tenedos_[54], not the refuge of the perfidious Greeks, but the retreat of Aaron the Hermit[55], who took up his abode on that island in 507, the date of the victory of Clovis over Alaric[56]: one founded a little convent, the other a great monarchy, two edifices both of which have perished.

[Sidenote: Saint-Malo.]

Malo, in Latin Maclovius, Macutus, or Machutes, became Bishop of Aleth in 541, and, attracted as he was by Aaron's fame, visited him. As chaplain of the hermit's oratory, after the saint's death he raised a cenobitical church, _in prædio Machutis._ Malo's name was given to the island, and subsequently to the town, Maclovium, Maclopolis.

Between St. Malo, first Bishop of Aleth, and Blessed John surnamed "of the Gridiron," who was consecrated in 1140 and built the cathedral, came five-and-forty bishops. Aleth was already almost wholly abandoned, and John of the Gridiron transferred the episcopal see from the Roman to the Breton city which was spreading over Aaron's rock.

Saint-Malo suffered greatly in the wars waged between the Kings of France and England. The Earl of Richmond, later Henry VII. of England, in whom ended the Wars of the Roses, was taken to Saint-Malo. He was handed over by the Duke of Brittany to the ambassadors of Richard, who carried him to London to be put to death. He escaped from his guards, and took refuge in the cathedral, _asylum quod in eâ urbe est inviolatissimum_: the right of sanctuary dated back to the Druids, the first priests of Aaron's isle.

A Bishop of Saint-Malo was one of the three favourites (the others were Arthur de Montauban and Jean Hingant) who killed the unfortunate Giles of Brittany, as may be read in the _Histoire lamentable de Gilles, seigneur de Chateaubriand et de Chantocé prince du sang de France et de Bretagne, étranglé en prison par les ministres du favori, le 24 avril 1450._

There exists a fine capitulation between Henry IV. and Saint-Malo: the city treats as between Power and Power, protects those who have taken refuge within its walls, and retains the right, by an order of Philibert de La Guiche, grand-master of artillery of France, to cast one hundred pieces of cannon. Nothing more closely resembled Venice (failing the sun and the pursuit of the arts) than did this little commonwealth of Saint-Malo in religion, wealth, and prowess at sea. It supported Charles V.'s expedition to Africa and came to the aid of Louis XIII. at the Rochelle. It flew its ensign over all the seas, maintained relations with Mocha, Surat, Pondicherry; a company formed in its midst explored the South Sea.

From the reign of Henry IV. onwards, my native city distinguished itself for its devotion and fidelity to France. The English bombarded it in 1693; on the 29th of November in that year, they launched against it an infernal machine, in the wreck of which I have often disported myself with my play-fellows. They bombarded it again in 1758.

The Malouins lent considerable sums of money to Louis XIV. during the war of 1701; in recognition of this service, he confirmed them in their privilege of guarding their own city, and ordered that the crew of the first ship in the Royal Navy should consist exclusively of sailors drawn from Saint-Malo and its territory. In 1771, the Malouins repeated their sacrifice and lent thirty millions to Louis XV.

The famous Admiral Anson[57] landed at Cancale in 1758, and burnt Saint-Servan. In Saint-Malo Castle, La Chalotais wrote upon rags, with the aid of a tooth-pick, soot and water, the Memoirs which made so much noise and which nobody remembers. Events efface events; they are but inscriptions traced upon other inscriptions, making pages of palimpsestic history.

Saint-Malo furnished the Royal Navy with its best sailors; the complete roll may be found in a folio volume published in 1682 with the title: _Rôle général des officiers, mariniers et matelots de Saint-Malo._ There is a _Coutume de Saint-Malo_, printed in the collection of the Customary-General. The city archives contain a fair number of charters useful to the study of history and maritime law.

Saint-Malo gave birth to Jacques Cartier[58], the French Christopher Columbus, who discovered Canada. At the other extremity of America the Malouins marked out the islands to which they gave their name: Îles Malouins[59]. It is the native city of Duguay-Trouin[60], one of the greatest seamen ever known, and more recently, of Surcouf[61]. The celebrated Mahé de La Bourdonnais[62], Governor of the Isle of France, was born at Saint-Malo, as were La Mettrie[63], Maupertuis, the Abbé Trublet, of whom Voltaire made sport: all this is not bad for an area not so large as that of the Tuileries Gardens.

Far ahead of these smaller literary lights of my birthplace stands the Abbé de Lamennais[64]. Broussais[65] also was born at Saint-Malo, as well as my noble friend, the Comte de La Ferronnays[66].

[Sidenote: The dogs of Saint-Malo.]