Chapter VI: Book II: 75 (1)

A note from M. Pasquier--Dieppe--Change in my education--Spring in Brittany--An historic forest--Pelagian fields--The moon setting over the sea--Departure for Combourg--Description of the castle--Dol College--Mathematics and languages--An instance of memory--Holidays at Combourg--Life at a country-seat--Feudal customs--The inhabitants of Combourg--Second holidays at Combourg--The Conti Regiment-Camp at Saint-Malo--An abbey--A provincial theatre--Marriage of my two eldest sisters--Return to college--A revolution begins to take place in my ideas--Adventure of the magpie--Third holidays at Combourg--The quack--Return to college--Invasion of France--Games--The Abbé de Chateaubriand--My First Communion--I leave Dol College--A mission at Combourg--Rennes College--I meet Gesril--Moreau-Limoëlan--Marriage of my third sister--I am sent to Brest for my naval examination--The harbour of Brest--I once more meet Gesril--Lapeyrouse--I return to Combourg

On the 4th of September 1812[76] I received the following note from M. Pasquier[77], the Prefect of Police:

"Prefect's Office.

"The Prefect of Police begs M. de Chateaubriand kindly
to call at his office, either at about four o'clock this
afternoon or at nine o'clock to-morrow morning."

The object of Prefect of Police in sending for me was to serve an order on me to leave Paris. I withdrew to Dieppe, which was first called Bertheville and more than a hundred years ago changed its name to Dieppe, from the English word "deep[78]." In 1788, I was in garrison here with the second battalion of my regiment: to dwell in this town of red-brick houses and ivory-white shops, this town of clean streets and clear atmosphere, was to take shelter in the days of my youth. When I walked out, I came across the ruins of Arques Castle, standing in the midst of its rubbish-heaps. It will be remembered that Dieppe was the birthplace of Duquesne[79]. When I stayed indoors, the sea lay spread before my view; from the table at which I sat I gazed upon the sea which saw me born and which bathes the shores of Great Britain, where I underwent so long an exile: my eyes surveyed the billows which carried me to America, cast me back upon Europe, and again bore me to the coasts of Africa and Asia. Hail, O sea, my cradle and my image! I will relate to thee the sequel of my story: if I lie, thy waves, commingled with all my days, shall accuse me of imposture to the generations to come.

[Sidenote: Change in my education.]

My mother had constantly desired that I should be given a classical education. The career of a sailor, for which I was intended, "would perhaps," she said, "not be to my taste;" she thought that, in any event, it would be well to make me capable of following another profession. Her piety led her to hope that I should decide in favour of the Church. She therefore proposed to send me to a college where I should learn mathematics, drawing, fencing and English; she did not mention Greek or Latin for fear of scaring my father; but she intended to have me taught them, at first in secret, and later openly, when I should have made progress. My father accepted her proposal: it was arranged to send me to the college at Dol. This town was selected because it lay upon the road from Saint-Malo to Combourg.

In the very cold winter immediately preceding my school-days, the house in which we lived took fire: I was saved by my eldest sister, who carried me through the flames in her arms. M. de Chateaubriand, who had gone to his castle, sent for his wife to join him there: we did so in the spring.

Spring in Brittany is milder than in the country round Paris, and the trees bud three weeks earlier. The five birds that herald its coming, the swallow, the loriot, the cuckoo, the quail, and the nightingale, come with the breezes that nestle in the gulfs of the Armorican Peninsula. The earth grows as thick with daisies, pansies, jonquils, narcissuses, hyacinths, ranunculuses, anemones as the neglected spaces around the churches of St. John Lateran and the Holy Cross of Jerusalem in Rome. Glades deck themselves with tall and graceful ferns; fields of broom and furze glow with flowers gay as golden butterflies. The hedgerows at whose feet strawberries, raspberries and violets abound are adorned with hawthorn, honeysuckle and brambles, whose brown and twisted shoots bear glorious fruit and leaves. The country is alive with bees and birds; swarms and nests greet the children at every step. In sheltered nooks, myrtle and oleander grow in the open as in Greece; the fig-tree ripens as in Provence; each apple-tree, with its carmine-tinted blossoms, resembles the large nosegay of a village bride.

[Sidenote: Spring in Brittany.]

In the twelfth century, the cantons of Fougères, Rennes, Bécherel, Dinan, Saint-Malo and Dol were covered by the Forest of Brécheliant, which had served as a battlefield to the Francs and the races peopling the Domnonée. Wace[80] tells of the wild man seen there, of the fountain of Berenton, and a golden basin. An historic document of the fifteenth century, the _Usemens et coutumes de la forêt de Brécilien_, confirms the statement of the _Roman du Rou_: it is, say the _Usemens_, of great and wide extent: "there are four castles, a very great number of fair pools, fine chaces where are found no venomous beasts nor insects, two hundred woods, as many springs, notably the fountain of Belenton, near which Sir Pontus wrought his feats of arms."

To this day the country-side retains traces of its origin: intersected by wooded ditches, it presents at a distance the aspect of a forest, and reminds one of England; it was the abode of the fairies, and you shall see that I did, in fact, meet a sylph there. Narrow dales are watered by shallow rivulets. These dales are separated by moors and by tufts and clusters of holly-trees. The coast presents an array of beacons, lookouts, dolmens, Roman structures, ruins of mediæval castles, Renascence steeples: all bordered by the sea. Pliny calls Brittany, _Peninsula Oceani spectatrix_[81].

Between the sea and the land stretch pelagian plains, the fickle frontier of the two elements: there the field-lark flies with the sea-lark; the plough and the bark furrow the earth and the water at a stone's throw one from the other. The sailor and the shepherd borrow each other's language: the seaman says, "The waves are fleecy;" the herd speaks of "fleets of sheep." Sands of changing colours, banks variegated with shells, wreckage, fringes of silver foam line the green or yellow edge of the corn-fields. I cannot recall the name of the island in the Mediterranean in which I saw a bas-relief representing nereids decorating with festoons the hem of Ceres' robe.

But what is most admirable in Brittany is to see the moon rising on land and setting upon the sea. The moon, by divine creation governess of the deep, has her clouds, her mists, her beams, her projected shadows like the sun; but, unlike the latter, she does not set alone: a retinue of stars accompanies her. As, upon my native coast, she descends the vault of heaven, she extends her silence, and communicates it to the sea; soon she sinks to the horizon, intersects it, shows but the half of her forehead, which diminishes, dips, and disappears in the yielding intumescence of the waves. The stars attendant upon their queen, before plunging in her train, seem to pause suspended upon the crest of the billows. No sooner has the moon set, than a gust of wind from the open sea shatters the picture of the stars, like candles extinguished after a celebration.

*

I was to accompany my sisters to Combourg: we set out in the first fortnight in May. We left Saint-Malo at sunrise, my mother, my four sisters and I, in a huge, antiquated berlin, with double-gilt panels, outside steps, and purple tassels at the four corners of the roof. To this were harnessed eight horses caparisoned like the mules in Spain, with bells at their collars and bridles, and housings and fringes of wool of many colours. While my mother was sighing and my sisters talking themselves out of breath, I looked with all my eyes, listened with all my ears, was wonderstruck at each turn of the road: the first steps of a Wandering Jew who was never to stop. Even then, if man changed only his surroundings! But his days change, and his heart.

[Sidenote: First view of Combourg.]

Our horses were rested at a fishing-village on Cancale Beach. We next went through the marshes and the fever-stricken town of Dol, and after passing the gate of the college to which I was soon to return, we plunged inland. For four mortal hours we saw nothing but heaths wreathed with woods, wastes scarce touched with the hoe, fields sown with poor, black, stunted corn, and poverty-stricken patches of oats. Charcoal-burners led teams of small horses with long and shaggy manes; lank-haired peasants in goat-skin great-coats drove lean bullocks with shrill cries or tramped behind a heavy plough, like laboring fauns. At last we caught sight of a valley at the bottom of which, not far from a pond, ascended the spire of a village church; the towers of a feudal castle rose amid the trees of a wood illumined by the setting sun.

I have been obliged to stop: my heart was beating so violently as almost to push back the table at which I am writing. The recollections awakened in my memory overpower me with their number and their force: and yet, what are they to the rest of the world?

After descending the hill, we forded a stream, drove on for half-an-hour, and then turned out of the high-road. The carriage rolled along a quincunx in an avenue of yoke-elms, whose crowns were interwoven above our heads: I still remember the moment at which I entered their shade and the feeling of affrighted gladness which I experienced.

On emerging from the darkness of the woods, we crossed a fore-court planted with walnut-trees, adjoining the house and garden of the steward; thence we passed, through a stone gateway, into a grassy court called the _Cour Verte._ On the right were a long row of stables and a clump of chesnut-trees; on the left, another clump of chesnut-trees. At the end of the court-yard, the lawn of which sloped imperceptibly upwards, appeared the castle between two clusters of trees. Its severe and gloomy frontage presented a curtain crowned with a machicolated, crenulated, covered gallery. This curtain connected two towers unlike in age, materials, height and thickness, which ended in battlements surmounted by a peaked roof, like a cap placed upon a Gothic crown.

Here and there, grated windows broke the bareness of the walls. A wide flight of steps, straight and steep, twenty-two in number, without balusters or hand-rail, took the place of the drawbridge across the moat, which was now filled up: it led to the door of the castle, pierced in the middle of the curtain. Above the door one saw the arms of the Lords of Combourg and the apertures through which had formerly issued the shafts and chains of the drawbridge.

The carriage drew up at the foot of the steps; my father came down to welcome us. The meeting with his family so greatly softened his mood for the moment, that he favoured us with his most gracious looks. We climbed the steps and entered a resonant vestibule, with a pointed arch, through which we passed into a small inner court-yard. From this yard we entered the building looking south over the pond, and joined to the two smaller towers. The whole castle had the shape of a four-wheeled cart. We found ourselves on the same floor in a room formerly known as the Guard-room. A window opened out at either end; two others were cut into the side-wall. To enlarge these four windows, it had been necessary to excavate walls of eight to ten feet in thickness. Two sloping galleries, like the gallery in the Great Pyramid, issued from the two outer angles and led to the small towers. A winding staircase in one of these towers formed a communication between the Guard-room and the upper storey. Such was this portion of the building.

That contained within the frontage of the tall and of the thick tower, commanding a north aspect over the Cour Verte, consisted of a sort of square and sombre dormitory used as a kitchen, in addition to the vestibule, the steps, and a chapel. Above these apartments was the Rolls Hall, or Armoury, or Hall of Birds, or Knights' Hall, so called from a ceiling strewn with blazoned coats-of-arms and painted birds. The embrasures of the narrow trefoil windows were so deep as to form recesses, around which ran a granite seat. Add to this, in different parts of the building, secret passages and staircases, dungeons and cells, a labyrinth of covered and open galleries, and walled-up underground passages, the ramifications of which were unknown; on all sides gloom, silence, and a face of stone: and you see Combourg Castle.

[Sidenote: Combourg castle.]

A supper served in the Guard-room, at which I ate without constraint, ended the first happy day of my life. True happiness costs little; when it is dear, it is not the real metal.

So soon as I awoke the next morning, I set out to visit the castle grounds and to celebrate my advent to solitude. The steps faced north-west. Seated in the centre of the top step, one saw before him the Cour Verte, and beyond this court a kitchen-garden stretching out between two belts of trees: one, on the right, the quincunx by which we had come, was called the Little Mall; the other, on the left, the Great Mall: the latter was a wood of oaks, beeches, sycamores, elms, and chestnuts. Madame de Sévigné extolled those old shades in her day: since that time, one hundred and forty years had added to their beauty.

In the other direction, south and east, the landscape offered a quite different view: through the windows of the great hall one saw the houses of Combourg, a pond, the embankment of the pond along which ran the Rennes high-road, a water-mill, a meadow covered with herds of cows and separated from the pond by the embankment. Along the edge of this meadow stretched a hamlet forming a dependency of a priory founded in 1149 by Rivallon, Lord of Combourg, and containing his mortuary statue, recumbent in a knight's armor. Beyond the pond, the ground rose gradually and formed an amphitheater of trees, whence issued village belfries and the turrets of country-houses. On the far horizon, between the west and the south, were outlined the heights of Bécherel. On that side, a terrace lined with large coppices skirted the foot of the castle, passed behind the stables, and repeatedly joined the fountain garden which communicated with the Great Mall.

If, after this too long description, a painter were to take up his pencil, would he produce a sketch resembling the castle? I do not think so; and yet the subject lives in my memory as though I had it before my eyes: so great is the power of recollection, so small the power of words in the expression of material things. When I begin to speak of Combourg, I quote the first couplets of a ballad which will charm none but myself: ask the Tyrolean herd why he finds pleasure in the three notes or four which he sings to his goats, notes of the mountain, flung from echo to echo to resound from one side of a torrent to the other.

My first appearance at Combourg lasted but a short while. When a fortnight had passed, the Abbé Porcher arrived, the principal of Dol College; I was handed over to him, and followed him despite my tears. I was in a fashion, connected with Dol; my father was a "canon" of the town, as the descendant and representative of the house of Guillaume de Chateaubriand, Lord of Beaufort, who in 1529 founded one of the first stalls in the cathedral choir. The Bishop of Dol was M. de Hercé, a friend of my family, and a prelate of great moderation in politics, who, kneeling, and crucifix in hand, was shot at Quiberon on the Champ du Martyre, together with his brother, the Abbé de Hercé[82]. On reaching the college, I was entrusted to the special care of M. l'Abbé Leprince, professor of rhetoric and a thorough geometrician, a man of intelligence, handsome, devoted to the arts, and a fair portrait-painter. He undertook to teach me my Bezout[83]; the Abbé Égault, master of the third form, became my Latin master: I studied mathematics in my own room, Latin in the common school-room.

It took some time for an owl of my species to grow accustomed to a school cage and to measure its flight by the sound of a bell. I was not able to make those quick friends with whom fortune supplies one, for there was nothing to be made out of a poor urchin who was not even endowed with pocket-money; nor did I join any set of hangers-on, for I hated protectors. In our games, I did not claim to lead others, but neither did I wish to be led: I was fitted to be neither a tyrant nor a slave, and so I have always remained.

And yet it happened that I soon became the centre of a set; later, in my regiment, I exercised the same power: plain ensign though I were, the older officers spent their evenings with me, and preferred my quarters to the coffee-house. I do not know whence this came, unless it were due to the ease with which I entered into the minds and adopted the manners of others. I was as fond of hunting and coursing as of reading and writing. To this day, it is a matter of indifference to me whether I speak of the most commonplace things or discuss the loftiest subjects. I am very little attracted by cleverness, and find it almost disagreeable, although I am not a fool. No imperfection offends me, except mockery and self-conceit, which I have great difficulty in not defying. I find that others are always my superiors in some respect, and if perchance I feel myself to have an advantage, I am quite embarrassed in consequence.

[Sidenote: My power of memory.]

Qualities which my early training had allowed to lie dormant were awakened at college. My aptitude for work was remarkable, my memory extraordinary. I made rapid progress in mathematics, to which I brought a clearness of apprehension that astonished the Abbé Leprince. At the same time, I displayed a decided taste for languages. The rudiments, the torture of school-boys, cost me no trouble to learn; I awaited the time of the Latin lessons with a sort of impatience, as a relief from my figures and geometrical problems. In less than a year, I was well ahead in the fifth form. In an odd manner, my Latin sentences shaped themselves so naturally into pentameters that the Abbé Égault called me the Elegist, a nickname which long clung to me among my schoolfellows.

I can quote two instances of my power of memory. I learnt my tables of logarithms by heart: that is to say, a number being given in geometrical proportion, I could quote from memory its exponent in arithmetical proportion, and _vice versâ._

After evening prayers, which were said in public in the college chapel, the principal used to read to us. One of the boys, taken at random, had to give an account of what had been read. We came to prayers from our games tired and very sleepy; we flung ourselves upon the forms, trying to hide in a dark corner so as not to be seen and consequently questioned. There was a confessional, in particular, which we fought for, as offering a safe retreat. One evening I had the good fortune to gain this harbor and thought myself safe from the principal; unluckily he perceived my stratagem, and resolved to make an example. Slowly and at great length he read the second head of a sermon; every one went to sleep. By mere chance, I remained awake in my confessional. The principal, who could only see the tips of my feet, thought that I had dropped off like the rest, and suddenly called me by my name and asked me what he had been reading.

The second head of the sermon contained an enumeration of the various ways in which it is possible to offend against God. I not only related the substance of the matter, but repeated the divisions in their proper order, and recited almost word for word several pages of mystical prose, devoid of meaning to a child. A murmur of applause ran through the chapel: the principal called me to him, gave me a tap on the cheek, and in reward allowed me to stay in bed next morning till breakfast-time. I modestly withdrew from my schoolfellows' admiration, and took good care to avail myself of the favour accorded me. This memory for words, which I have partly lost, has been replaced in my case by another and more singular kind of memory, of which I shall perhaps have occasion to speak.

One thing I find humiliating: memory is often the one accomplishment that accompanies stupidity; it belongs generally to ponderous minds, which it makes yet heavier with the luggage with which it overcharges them. And yet, without memory, where should we be? We should forget our friendships, our loves, our pleasures, our business; genius would be unable to collect its ideas; the fondest heart would lose its tenderness, if it lost its memory; our existence would be reduced to the successive moments of an incessantly gliding present; there would be no longer a past. Alas, unhappy that I am! Our life is so vain as to be but a reflex of our memory.

*

I went to Combourg for the holidays. Country-house life in the neighbourhood of Paris can give no idea of country-house life in a distant province. The Combourg property consisted, as its sole domain, of moorland, a few mills, and the two forests of Bourgouët and Tanoërn, in a district where timber is of almost no value. But Combourg was rich in feudal rights. These rights were of different kinds: some fixed certain dues in exchange for certain concessions, or established customs sprung from the ancient order of politics; others seemed from the first to have been sports and nothing more.

[Sidenote: Rustic sports at Combourg.]

My father had revived some of the latter rights, so as to prevent their lapsing by prescription. When the whole family were together, we took part in these Gothic amusements; the three principal were the Fishermen's Leap, the Quintain, and a fair called the Foire Angevine. Peasants in clogs and breeches, men of a France that is past, watched these sports of a France that is past. There were prizes for the winners, forfeits for the beaten.

The Quintain kept up the tradition of the tournaments: it had doubtless some connection with the old military service of the fiefs. It is very well described in Du Cange[84] (_voce_ QUINTANA). The forfeits had to be paid in old copper money, up to the value of two _moutons d'or à la couronne of 25 sols Parisis_ each[85].

The Angevin Fair was held in the meadow by the pond on the 4th of September of each year, my birthday. The vassals had to take up arms and come to the castle to raise the liege lord's banner; thence they went to the fair to establish order and enforce the collection of a toll due to the Counts of Combourg on each head of cattle, a sort of royalty. During that time my father kept open house. We danced for three days: the gentry in the great hall, to the scraping of a fiddle; the vassals in the Cour Verte, to the squealing of a bag-pipe. We sang, cheered, fired off arquebuses. These noises mingled with the lowing of the droves at the fair; the crowd wandered through the woods and gardens, and at least once in the year one saw at Combourg something akin to merriment.

Thus have I been so singularly placed in life as to have assisted at the tilting at the Quintain and at the proclamation of the Rights of Man; to have beheld the train-bands of a Breton village and the National Guard of France, the banner of the Lords of Combourg and the flag of the Revolution. I am as it were the last surviving witness of the feudal customs.

The visitors whom we received at the castle consisted of the inhabitants of the market-town and the neighboring gentry: these good people were my first friends. Our vanity attaches too much importance to the part we play in the world. The citizen of Paris laughs at the citizen of a small town; the Court noble scoffs at the provincial noble; the well-known scorns the unknown man, without reflecting that time does equal justice to their pretensions, and that they are all equally ridiculous or insignificant in the eyes of successive generations.

The principal resident of the place was a M. Potelet[86], a retired ship's captain of the Indian Company's service, who told us long stories about Pondicherry. He related them with his elbows resting on the table, and my father always had a mind to throw his plate in his face. Next came the bonder of tobacco, M. Launay de La Billardière[87], the father of a family of twelve, like Jacob, nine girls and three boys, of whom the youngest, David, was my playmate[88]. The worthy man bethought himself of aspiring to nobility in 1789: he chose a good time! In that house there was plenty of gaiety and many debts. Gesbert[89] the seneschal, Petit[90] the procurator-fiscal, Corvaisier[91] the receiver, and the Abbé Chalmel[92], the chaplain, formed the society of Combourg. I did not at Athens meet persons more celebrated than these.

Messieurs du Petit-Bois[93], de Château d'Assie[94], de Tinténiac, and one or two other noblemen would come on Sundays to hear Mass in the parish church, and afterwards to dine with the owner of the castle. We were more intimately acquainted with the Trémaudan family, consisting of the husband[95], the wife, who was extremely beautiful, a natural sister, and several children. This family lived on a small farm, with a dove-cote for sole evidence of nobility. The Trémaudans are still living. Wiser and happier than I, they have not lost sight of the turrets of the castle which I left thirty years ago; they are still doing what they did when I went to eat brown bread at their table; they have never left the port to which I shall never return. Perhaps they are speaking of me at the very moment at which I write this page: I reproach myself for dragging their name from its protective obscurity. They long hesitated to believe that the man of whom they heard speak was "the little chevalier." The rector or curate of Combourg, the Abbé Sévin[96], to whose sermons I used to listen, at first displayed the same incredulity: he could not persuade himself that the urchin, the peasants' friend, was the same as the defender of religion; he ended by believing it, and quotes me in his sermons, after having held me on his knees. Would these good people, who import no foreign idea into their image of me, who see me as I was in my childhood and in my youth, would they recognize me today through the disguise of time? I should be obliged to tell them my name before they would feel a wish to press me in their arms.

I bring bad luck to my friends. A game-keeper called Raulx, who was attached to me, was killed by a poacher. The murder made an extraordinary impression upon my mind. What a strange mystery lies in human sacrifice! Why should it be both the greatest crime and the greatest glory to shed the blood of man? My imagination pictured Raulx holding his entrails in his hands as he dragged himself to the cottage where he expired. I conceived the idea of vengeance; I should have liked to fight his murderer. In this respect I am curiously constituted: at the first moment of an offense, I hardly feel it; but it becomes imprinted on my memory; the recollection of it grows stronger, rather than fainter, with time; it sleeps within my heart for months, for whole years, and then awakens at the least circumstance with renewed force, and my wound becomes more painful than on the first day. But if I do not pardon my enemies, I do them no harm: I bear ill-will, but am not vindictive. If ever I have the power to revenge myself, I lose the wish: I should be dangerous only in misfortune. Those who have tried to make me yield by oppressing me have deceived themselves; adversity is to me what the earth was to Antæus: I gather fresh strength in my mother's bosom. If ever Good Fortune had taken me in her arms, she would have stifled me.

*

[Sidenote: Military visitors.]

I returned to Dol, much to my regret. The next year, a plan was formed for a descent upon Jersey, and a camp was established at Saint-Malo. Troops were quartered at Combourg; M. de Chateaubriand, through courtesy, entertained in succession the colonels of the Touraine and Conti Regiments. One was the Duc de Saint-Simon[97], the other the Marquis de Causans[98]. A score of officers were invited daily to my father's table. The jokes of these strangers displeased me; their walks disturbed the peacefulness of my woods. It was from seeing the lieutenant-colonel of the Conti Regiment, the Marquis de Wignacourt[99], gallop under the trees that the idea of travelling first passed through my mind.

When I heard our guests speak of Paris and the Court, I became sad; I tried to imagine what society was: I discovered a confused and distant something; but soon I turned giddy. Casting my eyes upon the world from the tranquil region of innocence, I had a swimming in the head, as when one looks down upon the earth from the top of a tower lost in the sky.

One thing, nevertheless, delighted me: the parade. Every day the soldiers going on guard marched past, to the sound of the drum and band, at the foot of the steps in the Cour Verte. M. de Causans offered to show me the camp on the coast: my father gave his leave. I was taken to Saint-Malo by M. de La Morandais[100], a gentleman of very good family, whom poverty had reduced to accept the stewardship of the Combourg property. He wore a coat of grey camlet, with a little silver lace at the collar, and a helmet-shaped peaked cap with flaps. He set me astride behind him, on the crupper of his mare Isabelle. I held fast by the belt of his hunting-knife, which he wore outside his coat: I was delighted. When Claude de Bullion and the father of the Président de Lamoignon, as children, went to the country, "they were both carried by the same donkey, in panniers, one on one side, the other on the other, and a loaf of bread was placed on Lamoignon's side because he was lighter than his fellow, to keep the balance." (_Mémoires du président de Lamoignon[101]._)

M. de La Morandais took cross-roads:

Moult volontiers, de grand' manière,
Alloit en bois et en rivière:
Car nulles gens ne vont en bois
Moult volontiers comme François[102].

We stopped for dinner at a Benedictine abbey which, for want of a sufficient number of monks, had just been incorporated in one of the chief communities of the order. We found only the father procurator, who had been left behind to dispose of the chattels and sell the timber. He ordered an excellent fish dinner to be served for us, in what was formerly the prior's library: we ate a quantity of new-laid eggs with huge pikes and carps. Through the arch of a cloister, I saw tall sycamores at the edge of a pond. The woodman's axe struck at their feet, their tops trembled in the air, and they fell to make a show for us. Carpenters, come from Saint-Malo, sawed off green branches, which dropped to the ground like the hair of a child cut for the first time, or squared the felled trunks. My heart bled at the sight of those impaired woods and that dismantled monastery. The general sack of the religious houses has since called up to my mind the spoliation of the abbey which was to me an omen.

[Sidenote: The Camp at Saint-Malo.]

I found the Marquis de Causans at Saint-Malo, and went through the streets of the camp under his escort. The tents, the stacked arms, the picketed horses made a fine spectacle in conjunction with the sea, the ships, the walls, and the distant steeples of the town. I saw gallop past me at full speed, in an hussar's uniform and mounted on a Barbary horse, one of those men who marked the end of a world, the Duc de Lauzun[103]. The Prince de Carignan[104] had come to the camp, and married the daughter of M. de Boisgarein, a charming creature, though a little lame: this caused a great sensation and gave rise to a law-suit in which' M. Lacretelle[105] the Elder is pleading to this day. But what have these things to do with my life? "It is pitie," says Montaigne; "I have assayed by the trial of some of my private friends: according as their memory hath ministered to them a whole and perfect matter, who recoil their narration so farre-backe, and stuff it with so many vaine circumstances, that if the story bee good, they smoother the goodnesse of it: if bad you must needs either curse the good fortune of their memorie, or blame the misfortune of their judgement.... I have heard some very pleasant reports become most irkesome and tedious in the mouth of a certaine Lord[106]." I am afraid of being that certaine Lord.

My brother was at Saint-Malo when M. de La Morandais set me down there. One evening he said to me:

"I am taking you to the play: get your hat."

I lost my head; I ran straight to the cellar to fetch my hat which was in the garret. A company of travelling play-actors had just arrived. I had seen a Punch and Judy show, and presumed that the puppets at the theatre were much finer than those in the street. With beating heart I reached a wooden building in an unfrequented street in the town. I went through dark passages, not without a certain movement of dread. A small door was opened, and I found myself with my brother in a half-full box.

The curtain was up, and the piece had commenced: they were playing the _Père de famille[107]._ I saw two men walk about the stage talking, while everybody looked on. I took them for the managers of the puppet-show, chatting before the time came for Madame Gigogne to tumble head over heels, awaiting the arrival of the audience: I was only surprised that they should discuss their business so loudly, and that they were listened to in silence. My amazement increased when other persons came upon the stage and began to make great gestures and shed tears, and when everybody began to cry in sympathy. The curtain fell without my having understood a word of all this. My brother went down to the green-room between the acts. I remained in the box among strangers, in an agony of shyness, and wished myself back at school. That was the first impression which I received of the art of Sophocles and Molière.

The third year of my life at Dol was marked by the wedding of my two eldest sisters: Marianne married the Comte de Marigny, and Bénigne the Comte de Québriac. They accompanied their husbands to Fougères: the first signal for the dispersion of a family whose members were soon to part. My sisters received the nuptial benediction at Combourg on the same day, at the same hour, at the same altar, in the castle chapel[108]. They wept, my mother wept; I was astonished at their grief: I understand it now. I never assist at a christening or a wedding without smiling bitterly or feeling anguish of heart. After the misfortune of being born, I know none greater than that of giving birth to a human being.

In this same year began a revolution, not only in my family, but in my own person. Chance caused to fall into my hands two very different books: an unexpurgated Horace and a history of _Confessions mal faites._ An incredible perturbation of ideas was produced in my mind by these two books: an unknown world arose around me. On the one side, I suspected the existence of secrets incomprehensible to one of my age, of a manner of living different from mine, of pleasures beyond my vision, of charms of an unknown nature in a sex in which I had only met a mother and sisters; on the other side, spectres dragging chains and vomiting flames threatened me with eternal torture for one sin concealed. I could not sleep; at night I thought I saw black hands and white pass by turns through the curtains of my bed: I began to imagine that the latter hands were cursed by religion, and this idea increased my terror of the infernal shades. In vain I sought in Heaven and Hell for the explanation of a two-fold mystery. Smitten at one and the same time in my moral and physical being, I continued to struggle with my innocence against the storms of premature passion and the terrors of superstition.

Thenceforward I felt escape from me some sparks of that fire which is the transmission of life. I was construing the fourth book of the _Æneid_ and reading _Télémaque_: suddenly I discovered in Dido and Eucharis beauties that delighted me; I felt the harmony of those admirable verses and of that classic prose. One day I translated Lucretius'

_Æneadum genitrix, hominum divinumque voluptas_[109]

at sight, with such spirit that M. Égault snatched the poem from my hands and set me to do my Greek roots. I stole a Tibullus: when I came to the

_Quam juvat immites ventos audire cubantem_[110],

these expressions of voluptuous melancholy seemed to reveal to me my own nature. The volumes of Massillon[111] which contained the sermons on the _Pécheresse_ and the _Enfant prodigue_ never left my side. I was allowed to read them, for no one suspected what I found in them. I stole short candle-ends from the chapel to enable me at night to read those alluring descriptions of the disorders of the soul. I fell asleep stammering incoherent phrases, in which I strove to employ the sweetness, the rhythm, and the grace of the writer who has been most successful in transmitting to prose the euphony of Racinian verse.

If, later, I have with some measure of truthfulness depicted the impulses which, mingled with Christian remorse, sway the heart, I am convinced that I owe this success to the chance which made me acquainted at the same moment with two hostile empires. The ravages made in my imagination by a bad book found their antidote in the terrors with which another book inspired me, and the latter were as it were allayed by the enervating thoughts drawn from pictures of the unveiled.

Misfortunes are said never to come singly, and the same may be said of passions: they come together, like the Muses or the Furies. With the propensity which began to torture me, there was born in me the sense of honor, an exaltation of the soul which preserves the heart uncorrupted in the midst of corruption, a sort of restorative principle placed beside a devouring principle, as the inexhaustible source of the prodigies which love demands of youth and of the sacrifices which it imposes.

When the weather was fine, the college boarders went out on Thursdays and Sundays. We were often taken to Mont Dol, on the top of which were some Gallo-Roman ruins: from the summit of this isolated eminence, the eye looks down on the sea and on marshes over which by night hovers the will o' the wisp, the wizard's light that burns in our lamps to this day. Another object of our walks was the fields in which stood a seminary of Eudists, after Eudes, brother of Mézeray the historian[112] and founder of their congregation. One day in May, the Abbé Égault, the prefect of the week, had taken us to this seminary. We were allowed full liberty in our games; only we were expressly forbidden to climb the trees. The master left us in a grassy lane, and walked away to say his breviary.

The lane was bordered by elms: right at the top of the tallest, a magpie's nest was clearly visible. We were all agog at the sight, pointing out to each other the mother sitting on her eggs, and smitten with the keenest longing to capture that superb prize. But who would dare to make the attempt? The orders were so strict, the prefect so near, the tree so high! Every hope was turned upon me; I climbed like a cat. I wavered, and then love of glory carried the day: taking off my coat, I flung my arms around the elm and began the ascent. The trunk had no branches, except at two-thirds of its height, where it split into a fork, one of whose extremities bore the nest.

[Sidenote: A Painful Predicament.]

Gathered beneath the tree, my friends applauded my efforts, looking up at me, looking in the direction whence the prefect might come, stamping with joy in their hope of the eggs, trembling with fear in their expectation of punishment. I approached the nest; the magpie flew away; I seized the eggs, put them inside my shirt, and began to climb down. Unfortunately, I slipped between the twin sections of the trunk and remained seated astraddle. The tree had been pruned, I could find no foothold on either side by which to raise myself and recover the outer limb, and I remained hanging in mid-air, fifty feet from the ground.

Suddenly a cry arose of "The prefect is coming!" and I saw myself incontinently abandoned by my friends, as always happens. One boy alone, called Le Gobbien, tried to assist me, and was soon obliged to relinquish his generous attempt. There was only one way to extricate myself from my painful position, which was to hang on outside, by my hands, to one of the two teeth of the fork, and to try, with my feet, to seize the trunk below the place where it split in two. I carried out this operation at the risk of my life. In the midst of my tribulations, I had not let go of my prize; I should have done better to fling it away, as I have since done with so many others. In sliding down the trunk, I rubbed the skin off my hands, bruised my legs and chest, and smashed the eggs: this last proved my ruin. The prefect had not seen me in the tree; I contrived to hide the traces of blood, but there was no concealing the brilliant yellow with which I was smeared.

"Very well, sir," he said, "you shall have the cane."

If that man had stated that he would commute this sentence to one of death, I should have experienced a thrill of joy. The notion of shame had never yet presented itself to one of my untrammeled upbringing: at no period of my life would I not have preferred any punishment to the horror of having to blush before a living creature. My heart filled with indignation; I answered the Abbé Égault, in the accents not of a child but of a man, that neither he nor any other should ever lay a hand upon me. This reply incensed him; he called me a rebel and promised to make an example of me.

"We shall see," I retorted, and began to play at ball with a coolness which confounded him.

We returned to the college; the prefect took me to his room and ordered me to prepare for punishment. My exalted sentiments gave place to floods of tears. I represented to the Abbé Égault that he had taught me Latin; that I was his scholar, his disciple, his child; that he could not wish to dishonor his pupil and make the sight of my schoolfellows unbearable to me; that he could lock me up on bread and water, stop my recreations, set me impositions; that I would thank him for his clemency and love him the more for it. I fell upon my knees, I folded my hands, I besought him in the name of Jesus Christ to spare me; he remained deaf to my entreaties. I rose in a fit of fury, and aimed at his legs a kick so violent that he yelled. He limped to the door of his room, locked it, and came back to me. I entrenched myself behind the bed; he struck out at me across the bed with a cane. I rolled myself in the bed-clothes and, heated with the fray, exclaimed:

_Macte animo, generose puer!_[113]

This brattish erudition made my enemy laugh in spite of himself; he suggested an armistice: we concluded a treaty; I agreed to refer the matter to the arbitration of the principal. Without giving his award in my favour, the principal consented to cancel the punishment which I had refused to take. When the excellent priest pronounced his acquittal, I pressed my lips to the sleeve of his gown with so great a display of heartfelt gratitude that he could not refrain from giving me his blessing. Thus ended the first combat which restored to me the honour which has been the idol of my life and which has so often cost me my repose, my pleasure, and my fortune.

[Sidenote: Holidays at Combourg.]

The holidays in the course of which I entered upon my twelfth year were sad ones. The Abbé Leprince accompanied me to Combourg. I went out only with my tutor; we took long rambles together. He was dying of consumption, and was silent and melancholy; I myself was not much livelier. We walked for hours without saying a word. One day we lost our way in the woods; M. Leprince turned to me and asked:

"Which way shall we go?"

I answered without hesitation:

"The sun is setting; it is now striking the window in the big tower; let us go that way."

M. Leprince the same evening told the incident to my father: the future traveller showed himself in that decision. Many a time, when I saw the sun set in the forests of America, have I recalled the woods of Combourg: my memories are echoes one of the other.

The Abbé Leprince wanted them to give me a horse; but according to my father's notions, the only thing a naval officer need know how to steer was his ship. I was reduced, therefore, to riding two fat coach-horses or a big piebald by stealth. The latter was not, like Turenne's _Pie_, one of those steeds which the Romans called _desultorii equi_[114] and trained to aid their masters; it was a moon-eyed Pegasus, which overreached in trotting, and bit my legs when I set it at a ditch. I never cared much about horses, although I have led the life of a Tartar; and, contrary to the effect which my early training should have produced, I ride with an elegant rather than a firm seat.

A tertiary fever, the germs of which I had brought with me from the marshes of Dol, rid me of M. Leprince. A quack passed through the village; my father, who did not believe in doctors, believed in charlatans: he sent for the empiric, who undertook to cure me in twenty-four hours. He returned the next day, in a green, gold-laced coat, a huge, powdered wig, wide ruffles of dirty muslin, false diamonds on his fingers, worn black satin breeches, bluey-white silk stockings, and shoes with enormous buckles. He pulled back my curtains, felt my pulse, made me put out my tongue, jabbered a few words with an Italian accent on the necessity for purging me, and gave me a little piece of burnt sugar to eat. My father approved of the treatment, for he maintained that all sickness came from indigestion, and that for every kind of ill you should purge your man till the blood came.

Half-an-hour after swallowing the caramel, I was seized with a terrible vomiting; they sent to tell M. de Chateaubriand, who wanted to throw the poor wretch from the window of the tower. The latter, terrified, took off his coat, tucked back his shirt-sleeves, and made the most grotesque gestures. At each movement, his wig turned in every direction; he repeated my cries, adding after each: "_Che, Monsou Lavandier?_" This Monsieur Lavandier was the village druggist, who had been called in to lend his aid. I did not know, in the midst of my pain, whether I should die from taking the man's nostrums or from bursting with laughter at his behavior. The effects of this overdose of emetic were stopped in time, and I was set on my legs again.

The whole of our life is spent in wandering round our tomb: our illnesses are so many puffs of wind that send us more or less near to the haven. The first corpse I saw was that of a canon of Saint-Malo: he lay dead upon his bed, his features distorted with the final convulsions. Death is beautiful, he is our friend: and yet we do not recognize him, because he comes to us masked, and his mask frightens us.

I was sent back to school at the end of autumn.

*

I have been permitted to leave Dieppe, whither a police order had driven me, and to return to the Vallée-aux-Loups, where I continue my narrative. The soil trembles beneath the steps of the foreign soldier, who is invading my country at this very moment; I am writing, like the last of the Romans, to the sound of the Barbarian invasion. By day I compose pages as agitated as the events of the day[115]; at night, while the rolling of the distant cannon dies away in my woods, I return to the silence of years that sleep in the grave, to the peace of my youngest memories. How short and narrow is a man's past beside the vast present of the nations and their immeasurable future!

*

Mathematics, Greek, and Latin occupied all my winter at school. The time that was not devoted to study was given up to boyish sports, which are the same all over the world. The little Englishman, the little German, the little Italian, the little Spaniard, the little Iroquois, the little Bedouin, all trundle the hoop and throw the ball. Brothers of one great family, children do not lose their features of resemblance until they lose their innocence, everywhere the same. Then the passions, modified by climates, governments, and customs, make different nations; the human race ceases to speak and understand the same language: society is the real Tower of Babel.

[Sidenote: The Abbé de Chateaubriand.]

One morning I was taking very energetic part in a game of base in the playground, when I was told that I was wanted. I followed the servant to the front gate. There I found a stout, red-faced man, with abrupt and impatient manners and a fierce voice; he carried a stick in his hand, wore a black and ill-curled wig, a torn cassock with the ends tucked into his pockets, dusty shoes, and stockings with holes at the heels.

"You little scamp," said he, "are not you the Chevalier de Chateaubriand de Combourg?"

"Yes, monsieur," I replied, quite bewildered at his manner of addressing me.

"And I," he retorted, almost foaming at the mouth, "am the last senior of your family; I am the Abbé de Chateaubriand de La Guerrande[116]: take a good look at me."

The proud ecclesiastic put his hand into the fob of a pair of old plush breeches, took out a moldy six-franc crown-piece wrapped in a piece of dirty paper, flung it at my head, and continued his journey on foot, muttering his matins as he went, with a furious air. I have since learnt that the Prince de Condé[117] had offered this rustic rector the post of tutor to the Duc de Bourbon[118]. The overbearing priest replied that the Prince, as the owner of the Barony of Chateaubriand, ought to know that the heirs of that barony could have tutors, but could not act as such. This haughtiness was the fault of my family; in my father it was hateful; my brother pushed it to a ridiculous length; it has descended in a certain measure to his eldest son. I am not sure that I myself, in spite of my republican inclinations, have entirely shaken it off, although I have been careful to conceal it.

*