BOOK III[147
At Montboissier--Reminiscences of Combourg--Dinan College--Broussais--I return home--Life at Combourg--Our days and evenings--My donjon--Change from childhood to manhood--Lucile--Last lines written at the Vallée-aux-Loups--Revelations concerning the mystery of my life--A phantom of love--Two years of delirium--Occupations and illusions--My autumn joys--Incantation--Temptation--Illness--I fear and decline to enter the ecclesiastical state--A moment in my native town--Recollection of Villeneuve and the tribulations of my childhood--I am called back to Combourg--Last interview with my father--I enter the service--I bid farewell to Combourg
Three years and six months have elapsed between the last date attached to these Memoirs, Vallée-aux-Loups, January 1814, and the date of today, Montboissier, July 1817. Did you hear the Empire fall? No: nothing has disturbed the repose of this spot. Nevertheless the Empire is lost; the immense ruin has crumbled in the course of my life like Roman remains overturned in the bed of some unknown stream. But events matter little to one who does not reckon them: a few years escaping from the hands of the Eternal Father will do justice to all these reports with an endless silence.
The previous chapter was written under the expiring tyranny of Bonaparte and by the light of the last flashes of his glory: I am commencing the present chapter under the reign of Louis XVIII. I have been in close proximity to kings, and my political illusions have vanished, as have the sweeter fancies of which I am continuing the tale. Let me first say what makes me resume my pen: the human heart is the toy of everything, nor can we foresee what trivial circumstance will cause its joys and sorrows. Montaigne remarked this: "There needeth no cause," he says, "to excite our minde. A doating humour without body, without substance, overswayeth and tosseth it up and down[148]."
I am now at Montboissier, on the borders of the Beauce and the Perche[149]. The castle situated upon this property, belonging to Madame la Comtesse de Colbert-Montboissier[150], was sold and demolished during the Revolution; only two pavilions remain, divided by a railing, and formerly inhabited by the lodge-keeper. The park, which is now laid out in the English style, retains some traces of its former French symmetry: straight walks, copses set within hedges give it a serious aspect; it has the attraction of a ruin.
Yesterday evening I was walking alone; the sky was like an autumn sky; a cold wind blew at intervals. I stopped at an opening in a thicket to look at the sun: it was sinking into the clouds above the tower of Alluye, from which Gabrielle[151], occupying that tower, saw the sun set, as I did, two hundred years ago. What has become of Henry and Gabrielle? The same that shall have become of me when these Memoirs are published.
I was drawn from my reflections by the twittering of a thrush perched on the topmost branch of a birch-tree. At once that magic sound brought back before my eyes my father's domain: I forgot the catastrophes which I had lately witnessed, and suddenly carried back into the past, I saw once more the fields where I had so often heard the thrush's song. When I listened to it then, I was sad, as I am today; but that first sadness was of the kind which springs from a vague longing for happiness, at a time when we are without experience; the sadness which I now feel comes from the knowledge of things appreciated and judged. The song of the bird in the Combourg woods told me of a happiness which I hoped to achieve; the same song in the park at Montboissier reminded me of days wasted in the pursuit of that unattainable happiness. I have nothing more to learn; I have travelled faster than others, and have made the circuit of life. The hours fly and drag me with them; I have not even the certainty of being able to complete these Memoirs. In how many places have I already commenced to write them, and in what place shall I finish them? How long shall I wander on the edge of the wood? Let me make the most of the few moments left to me; let me hasten to depict my youth, while I am still in touch with it: the traveller quitting for ever an enchanted shore writes his journal in sight of the land which is withdrawing, soon to disappear from sight.
I have described my return to Combourg and my reception by my father, my mother, and my sister Lucile. The reader will perhaps remember that my three other sisters were married and living on the estates of their new families in the neighbourhood of Fougères. My brother, whose ambition was beginning to display itself, was oftener in Paris than at Rennes. He first bought a post as _maître des requêtes_, which he sold in order to enter the military service. He entered the Royal Cavalry Regiment; he then joined the diplomatic service, and accompanied the Comte de La Luzerne to London, where he met André Chénier[152]; he was on the point of obtaining the Vienna Embassy, when our troubles broke out. He asked for Constantinople, but found a formidable competitor in Mirabeau, who had been promised this embassy as the price of his alliance with the Court party. My brother had therefore almost taken leave of Combourg at the time when I came to live there.
My father entrenched himself in his manor, which he never left, not even to attend the sittings of the States[153]. My mother went to Saint-Malo for six weeks in every year, at Eastertide; she looked forward to that time as the period of her deliverance, for she detested Combourg. A month before the journey, it was discussed as though it were a hazardous enterprise; preparations were made; the horses were rested. On the eve of departure, we went to bed at seven in the evening, in order to get up at two o'clock in the morning. My mother, to her great contentment, set out at three, and occupied the whole day in covering twelve leagues.
[Sidenote: I am sent to Dinan College.]
Lucile, who had been received as a canoness to the Chapter of the Argentière, was about to be transferred to that of Remiremont: while awaiting this change, she remained buried in the country. As for myself, after my escapade from Brest, I declared my wish to embrace the ecclesiastical state: the truth is that I was only seeking to gain time, for I did not know what I wished. I was sent to the college at Dinan to complete my humanities. I knew Latin better than my masters; but I began to learn Hebrew. The Abbé de Rouillac was the principal of the college, and the Abbé Duhamel my tutor.
Dinan, adorned with old trees, fortified with old towers, is built upon a picturesque site, on a high hill at the foot of which flows the tidal Rance, and overlooks sloping and pleasantly-wooded valleys. The mineral waters of Dinan have some renown. This historic city, which gave birth to Duclos[154], displayed among its antiquities the heart of Du Guesclin: an heroic dust which, stolen during the Revolution, was on the point of being pounded by a glazier to be used for paint. Was it intended for pictures of victories won over the enemies of the country?
M. Broussais, my fellow-townsman, became my fellow-student at Dinan. The students were taken to bathe on Thursdays, like the clerks under Pope Adrian I., or on Sundays, like the prisoners under the Emperor Honorius. Once I was nearly drowned; on another occasion, M. Broussais was bitten by ungrateful leeches, which failed to foresee the future[155]. Dinan was at an equal distance from Combourg and Plancoët. I visited my uncle de Bedée at Monchoix and my own family at Combourg by turns.
M. de Chateaubriand, who found it cheaper to keep me at home, my mother, who wished me to persist in my religious vocation, but who would have scrupled to urge me, no longer insisted upon my residence at college, and I found myself imperceptibly settling down under the paternal roof.
I should take pleasure in recalling the habits of my parents even if they were no more to me than a touching remembrance; but I reproduce them the more readily in that the picture will appear as though traced from the vignettes in mediæval manuscripts: centuries separate the present days from those which I am about to depict.
*
On my return from Brest the gentry at Combourg Castle consisted of four: my father, my mother, my sister, and me. A woman-cook, a waiting-maid, two footmen and a coachman composed the whole household: two old mares and a sporting-dog were huddled in a corner of the stable. These twelve living beings were lost to sight in a manor-house where a hundred knights, their ladies, squires, and varlets, and King Dagobert's chargers and pack might almost have gone unnoticed.
All through the year, not a visitor presented himself at the castle, save a few gentlemen, the Marquis de Montlouet[156], the Comte de Goyon-Beaufort[157], who begged a night's lodging on their way to plead their suits before the Parliament. They used to arrive in winter, on horseback, with pistols in their saddle-bows, hunting-knives at their sides, and followed by a servant, also on horseback, with a livery trunk behind him.
[Sidenote: Visitors to Combourg.]
My father, always very ceremonious, received them bareheaded on the steps, in the midst of the wind and rain. Once inside the house, the country gentlemen would talk of their Hanoverian campaigns, their family affairs, their law-suits. At night they were conducted to the North Tower, to Queen Christina's bed-chamber, a state-room containing a bed seven feet by seven, hung with a double set of curtains in green muslin and crimson silk, and held up by four gilt Cupids. The next morning, when I came down to the great hall and looked out through the windows upon the country covered with floods or hoar-frost, I saw nothing except two or three travelers on the lonely embankment of the pond: it was our guests riding away to Rennes.
These visitors did not know much about the things of life; nevertheless our view was by their means extended a few miles beyond the horizon of our woods. When they were gone, we were reduced on week-days to our family circle, and on Sundays to the company of the village commoners and the neighboring gentry.
On Sundays, in fine weather, my mother, Lucile, and I went to the parish church across the Little Mall and along a country road; when it rained, we went by the abominable Combourg High Street. We were not carried, like the Abbé de Marolles[158], in a light chariot drawn by four white horses, captured from the Turks in Hungary. My father went but once a year to the parish church to perform his Easter duties; the rest of the year he heard Mass in the castle chapel. Seated in the pew of the lord of the manor, we received the incense and the prayers in front of the black marble sepulchre of Renée de Rohan: a symbol of mortal honors; a few grains of incense before a tomb!
Our Sunday diversions vanished with the day; they did not even recur regularly. During the bad weather, entire months would pass and not a single human being knock at the gate of our fortress. The sadness was great that hung over the moors of Combourg, but greater still at the castle: as one made his way beneath its vaultings, he experienced the same feeling as on entering the Carthusian Monastery at Grenoble[159]. When I visited the latter in 1805, I crossed a wilderness which increased in desolation as I went; I thought it would end at the monastery, but I was shown, within the very convent walls, the gardens of the Carthusian Friars even more neglected than the woods. And at length, in the centre of the monument, I found, shrouded in the folds of all this solitude, the former graveyard of the community, a sanctuary from which eternal silence, the genius of the place, spread its dominion over the mountains and forests around.
[Sidenote: Life at Combourg Castle.]
The gloomy stillness of Combourg Castle was increased by my father's taciturn and unsocial humour. Instead of drawing his family and his retainers closer to him, he had dispersed them to all the winds of the building. His bedroom was in the small east tower, his study in the small west tower. The furniture of this study consisted of three chairs in black leather and a table covered with parchments and title-deeds. A genealogical tree of the Chateaubriand family adorned the chimney-mantel, and in the embrasure of a window hung arms of all sorts, from a pistol to a blunderbuss. My mother's room extended over the great hall, between the two small towers; it had a parqueted flooring and was adorned with faceted Venetian mirrors. My sister occupied a closet leading out of my mother's room. The waiting-maid slept far away, on the ground floor between the two great towers. Myself, I was nestled in a sort of isolated cell at the top of the turret containing the staircase which led from the inner yard to the different parts of the castle. At the foot of this staircase, my father's valet and the other man-servant lay in a vaulted basement, and the cook kept garrison in the great west tower.
My father rose at four o'clock in the morning, winter and summer alike: he went to the inner yard to call and wake his valet at the entrance to the turret staircase. A cup of coffee was brought to him at five; he then worked in his study till midday. My mother and sister each breakfasted in her own chamber at eight o'clock. I had no fixed time for rising or breakfasting; I was supposed to study till noon: the greater part of the time I did nothing.
At half-past eleven, the bell rang for dinner, which was served at twelve. The great hall did duty as both dining-room and drawing-room: we dined and supped at one end, on the east side; when the meal was over, we went and sat at the other end, the west side, before a huge chimney. The hall was wainscoted, painted whity-grey, and adorned with old portraits ranging from the reign of François I. to that of Louis XIV. Among these portraits one recognized those of Condé and Turenne: a picture representing Achilles slaying Hector beneath the walls of Troy hung over the chimney-piece.
After dinner we remained together until two o'clock. Then, if it was summer, my father went fishing, visited his kitchen-gardens, walked within the limits of the home park; in the autumn and winter he went shooting. My mother withdrew to the chapel, where she spent some hours in prayer. This chapel was a gloomy oratory, adorned with fine pictures by the greatest masters, such as one would scarcely expect to find in a feudal castle in the heart of Brittany. I still have in my possession a Holy Family by Albani, painted on copper, which was taken from this chapel: it is all that remains to me of Combourg. When my father had left the house and my mother gone to her prayers, Lucile withdrew to her room and I either returned to my cell or went out to roam about the country.
At eight o'clock the bell rang for supper. After supper, in fine weather, we sat out on the steps. My father, armed with his gun, shot at the brown owls which issued from the battlements at nightfall. My mother, Lucile and I watched the sky, the woods, the dying rays of the sun, the rising stars. At ten o'clock we went in and retired to bed.
The autumn and winter evenings were different. Supper over, the four of us would leave the table and gather round the chimney. My mother flung herself, with a sigh, upon an old couch covered in imitation Siam; a stand was put before her with a candle. I sat down with Lucile by the fire; the servants cleared the table and withdrew. My father then began a tramp which lasted till he went to bed. He was dressed in a white ratteen gown, or rather a kind of cloak, which I have seen no one wear except him. His half-bald head was covered with a big white cap that stood straight up on end. When he walked away to a distance from the fire-place, the huge hall was so badly lighted by its solitary candle that he was no longer visible; we could only hear him still walking in the darkness: then he would slowly return towards the light and gradually emerge from the dusk, like a ghost, with his white gown, his white cap, his long pale face. Lucile and I exchanged a few words in a low voice when he was at the other end of the hall; we hushed when he drew nearer to us. He asked, as he passed, "What were you talking about?" Terror-stricken, we made no reply; he continued his walk. For the rest of the evening, the ear heard nothing save the measured sound of his steps, my mother's sighs, and the murmuring of the wind[160].
The hour of ten struck on the castle clock: my father stopped; the same spring which had raised the hammer of the clock seemed to have arrested his steps. He drew out his watch, wound it, took a great silver candle-stick holding a tall candle, went for a moment to the small west tower, then returned, candle in hand, and went towards his bedroom, which formed part of the small east tower. Lucile and I placed ourselves on his way; we kissed him and wished him good-night. He turned his dry, hollow cheek to us without replying, continued his road, and withdrew inside the tower, the doors of which we heard closing behind him.
The spell was broken: my mother, my sister and myself, who had been changed into statues by my father's presence, recovered the functions of life. The first effect of our disenchantment took the form of an overflow of words: silence was made to pay us dear for having so long oppressed us. When this torrent of words had sped, I called the waiting-woman and escorted my mother and sister to their rooms. Before I went, they made me look under the beds, up the chimneys, behind the doors, and inspect the surrounding stairs, passages and corridors. All the traditions of the castle concerning robbers and ghosts returned to their memory. The servants were persuaded that a certain Comte de Combourg, with a wooden leg, who had been dead three centuries, appeared at certain intervals, and that he had been seen in the great staircase of the turret; sometimes also his wooden leg walked alone, accompanied by a black cat.
These stories took up the whole of the time occupied by my mother and sister in preparing for the night: they got into bed dying of fright; I climbed to the top of my turret; the cook returned to the main tower, and the men went down to their basement.
[Sidenote: My lonely nights.]
The window of my donjon opened upon the inner courtyard; by day I had a view of the battlements of the curtain opposite, where hart's-tongues grew and a wild plum-tree. Some martins, which in summer buried themselves, screeching, in the holes in the walls, were my sole companions. At night I could see only a small strip of sky and a few stars. When the moon shone and sank in the east, I knew it by the beams which struck my bed across the lozenged window-panes. Owls, flitting from one tower to the other, passed and passed again between the moon and me, outlining the mobile shadow of their wings upon my curtains. Banished to the loneliest part, at the opening of the galleries, I lost not a murmur of the darkness. Sometimes the wind seemed to trip with light steps; sometimes it uttered wailings; suddenly my door was violently shaken, groans issued from the basement, and then these sounds would die away, only to commence anew. At four o'clock in the morning, the voice of the master of the castle, calling the footman at the entrance to the venerable vaults, made itself heard like the voice of the last phantom of the night. This voice supplied for me the place of the sweet harmony with the sound of which Montaigne's father was wont to awaken his son[161].
The Comte de Chateaubriand's stubbornness in making a child sleep alone at the top of a tower might have had its inconvenience, but it turned out to my advantage. This violent manner of treatment left me with the courage of a man, without taking from me that vivid imagination of which it is nowadays the tendency to deprive the young. Instead of seeking to persuade me that ghosts did not exist, they obliged me to set them at defiance. When my father asked me, with an ironical smile, "Is monsieur le chevalier afraid?" he could have made me sleep with a corpse. When my excellent mother said, "My child, nothing happens without God's leave; you have nothing to fear from evil spirits so long as you remain a good Christian," I was more reassured than by all the arguments of philosophy. So complete was my success, that the night winds, in my uninhabited tower, served but as playthings for my fancies and wings for my dreams. My imagination, thus kindled, spread over every object, found nowhere sufficient nourishment, and could have devoured heaven and earth. It is this moral condition which it is now my task to describe. Immersed once more in the days of my youth, I will try to grasp myself in the past, to depict myself such as I was, such as perhaps I regret that I no longer am, despite the torments which I then endured.
*
Scarcely had I returned from Brest to Combourg when a revolution took place in my existence; the child vanished and there appeared the man, with his joys which pass and his troubles which remain. At first all became passion with me, pending the arrival of the passions themselves. When, after a silent dinner, at which I had dared neither to eat nor speak, I succeeded in escaping, my delight was incredible. I could not descend the steps then and there: I should have flung myself headlong. I was obliged to sit upon one of the steps to allow my excitement to subside; but so soon as I had reached the Cour Verte and the woods, I began to run, to leap, to bound, to skip, to rejoice until I fell down exhausted, panting, drunk with frolic and liberty.
My father took me with him shooting. I was seized with the taste for sport, and carried it to excess; I still see the field where I killed my first hare. Often, in autumn, I have stood for four or five hours to my waist in water, waiting at the edge of a pond for wild-duck; to this very day I lose my composure when I see a dog point. Nevertheless, my first ardor for sport was built upon a basis of independence; to leap ditches, to tramp over fields, marshes, moors, to find myself with a gun in an unfrequented spot, alone and powerful, all this was my natural manner of being. When out shooting, I would go so far that I had not the strength to walk back, and the keepers were obliged to carry me on twisted branches.
However, the pleasures of the chase no longer satisfied me; I was fretted with a longing for happiness which I could neither control nor understand; my mind and my heart ended by forming as it were two empty temples, without altars or sacrifices; it was not yet known which god would be worshipped there. I grew up by the side of my sister Lucile: our friendship was all our life.
*
Lucile was tall and endowed with remarkable, but serious, beauty. Her pale features were shaded with long black tresses; she often fixed her eyes on heaven or cast looks around her full of sadness or fire. Her gait, her voice, her smile, her expression showed something pensive and suffering.
[Sidenote: Lucile.]
Lucile and I were mutually useless. When we spoke of the world, it was of that which we carried within ourselves, a world very unlike the true world. She saw in me her protector, I in her my friend. She was seized with gloomy fits of thought which I had difficulty in dispelling: at the age of seventeen she bewailed the loss of her youth; she wished to bury herself in a convent. Everything to her was a care, a sorrow, a hurt: an expression she sought for, an illusion she entertained would torment her for months on end. I have often seen her, with one arm thrown over her head, dream without life or movement; the life that was in her ebbed to her heart, and ceased to show itself without; her very bosom no longer heaved. Her attitude, her melancholy, her beauty gave her the air of a funeral Genius. I then endeavored to console her, and the next moment was myself plunged in inexplicable despair.
Lucile liked to read some pious book, in the evening, alone: her favourite oratory was the junction of two country-roads, marked by a stone cross and a poplar-tree, whose long stylus rose into the sky like a pencil. My mother, devout and quite charmed, said that her daughter reminded her of a Christian of the primitive Church, praying at the stations called _Lauræ._
My sister's concentration of mind gave birth to extraordinary intellectual effects: in her sleep, she dreamt prophetic dreams; waking, she seemed to read the future. A clock ticked upon a landing of the staircase in the main tower, and struck the hours amid the silence. Lucile, when unable to sleep, would go to sit upon a stair opposite the clock and watch its face by the light of her lamp placed upon the ground. When the two hands met at midnight and in their formidable conjunction engendered the hour of disorder and crime, Lucile heard sounds which revealed distant deaths to her. She was in Paris a few days before the 10th of August, staying with my other sisters near the Carmelite Convent, and casting her eyes upon a mirror, she gave a cry, and said, "I have just seen Death come in." On the moors of Scotland, Lucile would have been one of the celestial women of Walter Scott, gifted with second sight; on the moors of Brittany, she was no more than a lonely creature favoured with beauty, genius and misfortune.
*
The life which my sister and I led at Combourg heightened the exaltation natural to our age and character. Our chief pastime was to walk side by side in the Great Mall, in spring on a carpet of primroses, in autumn on a bed of dead leaves, in winter on a sheet of snow edged by the footprints of birds, squirrels, and weazels. We were young as the primroses, sad as the dead leaves, pure as the newly-fallen snow: our recreations were in harmony with ourselves.
It was during one of these walks that Lucile, hearing me speak rapturously of solitude, said, "You ought to write all that down." These words revealed the muse to me; a divine inspiration passed over me. I began to lisp verses, as though it were my natural language; day and night I sang my pleasures, in other words my valleys and my woods; I wrote a multitude of little idylls or pictures of nature[162]. I wrote in verse long before writing in prose: M. de Fontanes used to maintain that I had received both instruments.
Did this talent which friendship foresaw for me ever really come to me? How many things have I awaited in vain! In the _Agamemnon_ of Æschylus, a slave is placed as sentry on the roof of the palace of Argos; his eyes seek to discern the concerted signal for the return of the ships; he sings to while away his vigils, but the hours speed by and the stars set, and the torch does not shine forth. When, after many years, its tardy light appears upon the billows, the slave is bent beneath the weight of time; there is naught left for him but to reap misfortunes, and the chorus says to him that "an old man is a shadow that wanders by day."
Οναρ ἡμερόϕαντον ἀλαίνει
Under the first spell of my inspiration, I engaged Lucile to do as I