La Vallée-aux-Loups, near Aulnay, October 4, 1811
FOUR YEARS ago now, on my return from the Holy Land, I bought a country house close to the hamlet of Aulnay, near Sceaux and Châtenay, hidden among the wooded hills. The area around the house is sandy, uneven—a sort of wild orchard with a gully and a grove of chestnuts at the far end. This narrow space seemed room enough to contain my long hopes; spatio brevi spem longam reseces.[1] The trees that I have planted here are thriving, though they are still so small that I give them shade when I stand between them and the sun. One day, they will give me shade: they will shelter me in my old age as I have sheltered them in their youth. I have chosen them, so far as I was able, from the many places I have wandered. They put me in mind of my travels, and nourish other illusions in the depths of my heart.
Should the Bourbons ever resume the throne, I would ask nothing more of them, in return for my loyalty, than to be made rich enough to buy the woodlands surrounding my estate. Ambition has taken hold of me; I would like to add a few acres to my walks. Knight-errant though I am, I have the sedentary tastes of a monk. Since I have lived in this place, I doubt whether I have set foot outside my enclosure more than three times. If my pines, my spruces, my larches, and my cedars live up to their promise, someday the Vallée-aux-Loups will be a veritable hermitage. And when Voltaire was born at Châtenay, on February 20, 1694, how did it look—this hillside where, in 1807, the author of The Genius of Christianity would come to retire?
The place pleases me. It has supplanted, in my mind, even my father’s fields. I have paid for it with my dreams and my sleepless nights. It is to the great wilderness of Atala that I owe this little wilderness of Aulnay, and to create this refuge I did not, like the American settlers, have to scalp any Florida Indians. I am fond of my trees; I have read elegies, sonnets, and odes to them. There is not one of them that I haven’t cared for with my own hands, that I haven’t relieved of a worm attached to its roots or a caterpillar clinging to its leaves; I know all of them by their names, like children. They are my family—I have none other—and I hope to die among them.
Here, I wrote The Martyrs, the Abencerages, the Itinerary, and Moïse. Now what shall I do, these autumn evenings? This October 4, 1811, my saint’s day and the anniversary of my entry into Jerusalem, tempts me to begin the story of my life. The man who gives France power over the world today only to trample her underfoot, this man whose genius I admire and whose despotism I abhor, this man encircles me with his tyranny as with a second solitude; but though he crushes the present, the past defies him, and I remain free in everything that preceded his glory.
Most of my feelings have hitherto stayed hidden in the depths of my soul or shown themselves in my work in the guise of imaginary beings. I still miss my chimeras today, but I shall not pursue them. I want to climb back up the slope of my better years. These pages shall be a funerary shrine raised to the light of my memories.
•
The circumstances of my father’s birth and the trials of his early life gave him one of the gloomiest characters that there have ever been. No doubt, this character influenced my ideas by terrorizing my childhood, desolating my youth, and deciding the manner of my education.
I was born a gentleman. And I think I have profited from this accident of birth, for I have retained that very firm love of liberty which belongs principally to the aristocracy whose last hour has struck. Aristocracy has three successive ages: the age of superiority, the age of privilege, and the age of vanity. Once through with the first, it degenerates into the second, and dies out in the last.
One can find my family, if the fancy strikes him, in Moréri’s dictionary, in the various histories of Brittany by d’Argentré, Dom Lobineau, and Dom Morice, in the Histoire généalogique de plusieurs maisons illustres de Bretagne by Father Dupaz, in Toussaint Saint-Luc, Le Borge, and finally in Father Anselme’s Histoire des Grands Officiers de la Couronne.*
The proofs of my lineage were made out by Chérin when my sister Lucile was admitted as a canoness to the Chapter of L’Argentière, before she went on to the Chapter of Remiremont; they were reproduced when I was presented to Louis XVI, again when I joined the Order of Malta, and once more when my brother was presented to that same unfortunate Louis XVI.
My family name was originally written Brien, then Briant and Briand, after the invasion of French spelling. Guillaume le Breton renders it Castrum-Briani. But there’s not a name in France that lacks such variations. Who knows the correct spelling of Du Guesclin?
The Briens, at the beginning of the eleventh century, gave their name to an important castle in Brittany, and this castle became the seat of the Barony of Chateaubriand. Originally, the family coat of arms was a cluster of pinecones bearing the motto: Je sème l’or.[2] Then Geoffroy, Baron de Chateaubriand, went with Saint Louis to the Holy Land. Taken prisoner during the battle of Masura, he returned; his wife Sybille died of joy and shock at seeing him again. Saint Louis, as a reward for his services, granted him and his heirs, in exchange for their old coat of arms, a shield of gules[3] scattered with gold fleurs-de-lys. Cui et ejus haeredibus, attests a cartulary in the priory at Bérée, sanctus Ludovicus tum Francorum rex, propter ejus probitatem in armis, flores lilii auri, loco pomorum pini auri, contulit.[4]
Almost from the outset, the Chateaubriands diverged into three branches. The first, called the Barons de Chateaubriand, formed the stock of the other two and began in the year 1000 in the person of
Thiern, the son of Brien and the grandson of Alain III, Count or Lord of Brittany. The second were named the Seigneurs de Roches Baritaut or the Seigneurs de Lion d’Angers. The third went under the title of the Sires de Beaufort.
When the Beaufort line died out in the person of Lady Renée, one Christophe II, who came from a collateral branch of the blood-line, inherited the Guérande estate in Morbihan. At that time, in the middle of the seventeenth century, there was widespread confusion in the order of nobility. Many names and titles had been usurped, so that Louis XIV called for an inquest, in order to restore each noble to his proper station. Christophe, having provided proof of his ancient noble extraction, was upheld in his right to arms and title by decree of the tribunal established at Rennes for the reformation of the Breton nobility. The decree, issued on September 16, 1669, reads as follows:
Between the King’s Attorney General and Monsieur Christophe de Chateaubriand, Sieur de la Guérande, the tribunal declares the aforesaid Christophe to be of ancient noble extraction, permits him to the rank of Chevalier, and confirms his right to bear arms of gules scattered with fleurs-de-lys without limit; and this after the production of his authentic claims thereto, from which it appears, etc., etc. The said judgment signed, Malescot.
This decree certifies that Christophe de Chateaubriand de la Guérande was directly descended from the Sires de Beaufort, who were themselves directly descended, as historical documents show, from the first Barons de Chateaubriand. The Chateaubriands of Villeneuve, du Plessis, and de Combourg[5] were thus younger branches of the Chateaubriands de la Guérande, through the lineage of Amaury, whose brother Michel was the son of this same Christophe de la Guérande whose noble extraction was confirmed by the decree of September 16, 1669, quoted above.
After my presentation to Louis XVI, my brother had the idea of augmenting my fortune as a younger son by securing me some of those ecclesiastical benefits called bénéfices simples. There was only one practicable way to go about this, since I was a layman and a soldier, and that was to make me a member of the Order of Malta. So it came about that my brother sent my proofs to Malta, and soon after presented a petition in my name to the Chapter of the Grand Priory of Aquitaine, held at Poitiers, requesting that commissioners be appointed to decide my urgent case.
M. Pontois was then the archivist, vice chancellor, and genealogist of the Order of Malta. The president, bailiff, and Grand Prior of Aquitaine was Louis-Joseph des Escotais, having with him the Bailiff of Freslon, the Chevalier de La Laurencie, the Chevalier de Murat, the Chevalier de Lanjamet, the Chevalier de La Bourdonnaye-Montluc, and the Chevalier du Bouetiez. My petition was reviewed from September 9 to 11, 1789. It was decided, in the words of my admission documents, that I merited “by more than one claim” the favor I requested and that “considerations of the greatest weight” made me worthy of the satisfaction I demanded.
And all this took place after the taking of the Bastille, on the eve of the events of October 6, 1789, and the transfer of the royal family to Paris! Only two months earlier, on August 7, the National Assembly had abolished all aristocratic titles! How was it that the Chevaliers and examiners of my proofs found that I merited “by more than one claim the favor I requested”—I, who was nothing but a puny sublieutenant in the infantry, unknown, without credit, without favor or fortune?
My brother’s eldest son, the Comte Louis de Chateaubriand (I am adding this in 1831 to my original text, written in 1811), married Mademoiselle d’Orglandes, by whom he had five daughters and a son named Geoffroy. Louis’s younger brother, Christian, the great-grandson and godson of M. de Malesherbes (to whom he bore a striking resemblance), served with distinction in Spain as a captain of the dragoons, in 1823.[6] He later became a Jesuit in Rome. The Jesuits alleviate the pains of solitude even as solitude passes from the earth. Not long ago, Christian died in Chieri, near Turin. I am old and sick and should have gone before him, but his virtues called him to heaven before me: I still have a fair number of faults to lament.
In the division of the family patrimony, Christian received the estate of Malesherbes and Louis the estate of Combourg. Christian, who did not regard this equal allotment as lawful, wished, on leaving the world, to dispossess himself of the properties that did not belong to him and to bequeath them to his elder brother.
In light of my proofs, it would be no one’s affair but mine, had I inherited my father and brother’s infatuation, if I considered myself the scion of the ancient Dukes of Brittany, descended from Thiern, the grandson of Alain III.
Twice the Chateaubriands have mingled their blood with the blood of English sovereigns: Geoffroy IV de Chateaubriand took as his second wife Agnès de Laval, the granddaughter of the Comte d’Anjou and Matilda, the daughter of Henry I; Marguerite de Lusignan, the widow of the King of England and the granddaughter of Louis Le Gros, was married to Geoffroy V, the twelfth Baron de Chateaubriand. If we turn to the royal families of Spain, we discover another Brien, the younger brother of the ninth Baron de Chateaubriand, who married Jeanne, the daughter of Alphonso, the King of Aragon. If we turn yet again, to the great families of France, we find that Édouard de Rohan took as his wife Marguerite de Chateaubriand, and that one Croï married a Charlotte de Chateaubriand. Tinteniac, the victor in the Combat des Trente, and Du Guesclin, the Constable, might well have made alliances with any of the three branches of the family. Tiphaine du Guesclin, the granddaughter of the famous Constable Bertrand, ceded the estate of Plessis-Bertrand to Brien de Chateaubriand, her cousin and heir. Chateaubriands have signed their names as sureties on treaties between warring kings of France, for Clisson, and for the Baron de Vitré. The Dukes of Brittany used to send the Chateaubriands records of their proceedings. Chateaubriands became High Officers of the Crown and illustrious members of the Court of Nantes. They were charged with the duty of guarding their province against English attack. Brien I, the son of Eudon, Comte de Penthièvre, took part in the Battle of Hastings. Guy de Chateaubriand was one of a number of lords that Arthur de Bretagne appointed to accompany his son when he served as ambassador to the Pope in 1309.
I would never come to an end if I were to complete this family history that I have merely wished here to outline in brief. But then, many today go to the other extreme. It has become commonplace to declare that one comes from “exploited laborers” or that one has the honor of being the son of a “man of the soil.” But are these declarations of pride or philosophy? Are they not merely taking the side of the powerful? The marquis, comtes, and barons of the present age have neither privileges nor plows. Three-fourths of them are starving to death even as they go on gossiping behind each other’s back, refusing to recognize each other, and mutually contesting their claims to noble birth. These nobles, denied even their own names, or permitted them only because they must be listed in an inventory—can they really inspire fear? For the rest, please pardon me for having been compelled to lower myself to such puerile recitations. My aim was to give some account of my father’s ruling passion, a passion which formed the core drama of my youth. For my part, I neither glorify nor complain of the old society or the new one. If in the first I was the Chevalier or Vicomte de Chateaubriand, in the second I am François de Chateaubriand, and I prefer my name to my title.
Monsieur my father, like a medieval lord, would readily have called God “the Gentleman on high” and nicknamed Nicodemus (the Nicodemus of the Gospel) a “holy gentleman.” But now, passing over my immediate progenitor, let us go from Christophe, the feudal lord of Guérande, and descend down the direct line of the Barons de Chateaubriand to me, François, the Lord, without vassals or money, of the Vallée-aux-Loups.
•
Looking back at the Chateaubriand family tree, composed of three branches, one observes that the first two stopped short, and that the third, the Sires de Beaufort, kept alive by Christophe’s branch at La Guérande, became impoverished. This was an inevitable result of the law of the land. Eldest sons, according to Breton custom, received two-thirds of the estate, while the others divided the remaining third among themselves. The decomposition of such puny portions occurred all the more rapidly when these younger sons married. As the same distribution of two-thirds and one-third was visited upon their children, the younger sons of younger sons soon came to dividing a pigeon, a hare, a duck pond, and a hunting hound among them, even as they continued to be “noble knights and puissant lords” of a dovecote, a toadhole, or a warren of rabbits. One finds a preponderance of these unfortunate cadets in old aristocratic families. Their lines persist for a generation or two, then vanish, as their children return one by one to the plow, or are absorbed into the laboring classes, without anyone knowing what became of them.
The head of my family in name and arms was, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a man named Alexis de Chateaubriand, Lord of La Guérande. He was the son of Michel, the elder brother of Amaury and the son of Christophe, whose noble extraction from the Sires de Beaufort was confirmed by the decree quoted above. This Alexis de la Guérande was a widower and a committed souse. He passed his days carousing with his servants in complete disorder and used the finest family documents to seal his butter jars.
At the same time, there lived another Chateaubriand, named François, the son of Amaury. François, born February 19, 1683, owned the small domains of Les Touches and La Villeneuve. On August 27, 1713, he had married Pétronille-Claude Lamour, Lady of Lanjegu, by whom he had four sons: François-Henri, René (my father), Pierre, and Joseph. My grandfather, François, died March 28, 1729; but my grandmother I knew all through my childhood, when her lovely eyes still sparkled in the shadow of her years. She resided, after her husband’s death, on the manor at La Villeneuve, near Dinan. Her entire fortune amounted to no more than 5,000 livres a year, of which her eldest son would take two thirds, leaving the last third to be divided among the younger three, from which sum the eldest would again deduct the praecipuum.
To crown her misfortunes, my grandmother found her every plan thwarted by the character of her sons. The eldest, François-Henri, to whom the magnificent estate of La Villeneuve devolved, refused to be married and became a priest; but instead of collecting the benefices which his name could have secured him, and with which he might have supported his brothers, out of pride and insouciance he asked for nothing. He buried himself in a country parish and became a rector, first of Saint-Launeuc and then of Merdrignac, in the diocese of Saint-Malo. He had a passion for poetry, I know, because I have looked over a good number of his verses. The merry temperament of this aristocratic sort of Rabelais, and the worship that this Christian priest dedicated to the pagan Muses, aroused no small curiosity. In the end, he gave away everything he had and died insolvent.
The youngest son, Joseph, went to Paris and immured himself in a library. Every year, he was sent his little parcel of 416 livres. Every year of his short life, on January 1, he wrote his mother a letter: the only sign that he ever gave of his existence. Otherwise, he lived unknown among his books, occupying himself with historical research. Singular fate! Here you have my two uncles, one a scholar and the other a poet. My elder brother used to write pleasant enough verse, and one of my sisters, Madame de Farcy, had a real talent for poetry. Another of my sisters, the Comtesse Lucile, a canoness, deserves to be remembered for a few of her admirable pages. And I have blackened plenty of paper myself. My brother perished on the scaffold, my two sisters departed their painful lives after many years spent languishing in prison, and my two uncles didn’t leave enough to pay for the four planks of their coffins. As for myself, literature has caused me both joy and sorrow, and I don’t despair, God willing, of dying in the poorhouse.
My grandmother, having exhausted her means of doing anything for her eldest and youngest sons, could do nothing for either René, my father, or Pierre, my uncle. This family, which had once “scattered gold,” according to its motto, now looked out from its modest manor onto the rich abbeys it had founded and where its ancestors lay entombed. Chateaubriands had presided over the Estates of Brittany, signed treaties between sovereigns, and served as sureties to Clisson. Now they lacked enough credit to obtain a sublieutenancy for the heir to their name.
The only resource that remained to poor Breton nobles was the Royal Navy. The family tried turning this to my father’s advantage. But first he would have to travel to Brest, pay for lodgings, hire instructors, buy uniforms, weapons, books, and mathematical instruments. How were these expenses to be defrayed? The commission sent to the Naval Minister never arrived, for want of a patron to demand its dispatch. And the Lady of Villeneuve fell sick with grief.
Then my father showed the first sign of that deep-seated decisiveness which I later knew so well. He was about fifteen years old. Seeing his mother’s distress, he went to sit beside the bed where she lay and said to her, “I will no longer be a burden on you.”
At this, my grandmother started to cry. (I heard my father tell this story twenty times at least.)
“René,” she said, “what do you want to do? You must till your fields.”
“They cannot keep us fed,” he said. “Let me go.” “Very well,” said my grandmother. “Go then, wherever God wills you go.”
She embraced her child, sobbing. That same night, my father left his mother’s farm and rode to Dinan, where one of our relatives gave him a letter of recommendation to take to a man in Saint-Malo. There, the orphaned adventurer embarked as a volunteer on an armed schooner, which set sail a few days later.
The tiny republic of Saint-Malo was then alone in defending the honor of the French flag at sea. The schooner joined the fleet that Cardinal Fleury was sending to aid Stanislaus, besieged at Danzig by the Russians. My father set foot ashore and found himself in the memorable battle of May 29, 1734, when fifteen hundred Frenchmen, commanded by the brave Breton de Bréhan, Comte de Plélo, fought 40,000 Muscovites, commanded by Munich. De Bréhan, a diplomat, a warrior, a poet, was killed. My father was wounded twice. He returned to France and set sail again. Shipwrecked on the coast of Spain, he was beaten and robbed by Galician bandits. He found passage on a ship in Bayonne and materialized once again beneath the paternal roof. By now his courage and clear thinking had garnered him a reputation. He sailed for the West Indies, grew rich in the colonies, and laid the foundations of a new family fortune.
My grandmother entrusted her son René with the fate of her son Pierre, M. de Chateaubriand du Plessis, whose child, Armand de Chateaubriand, was shot, at Bonaparte’s command, on Good Friday, 1810. He was one of the last French gentlemen to die for the cause of the monarchy.† Although my father did take care of his brother, he had contracted, through long suffering, a rigidity of character which he would retain all his days. Virgil’s non ignara mali does not always hold true.[7] Misfortune breeds severity as well as tenderness.
Monsieur de Chateaubriand was tall and lean; he had an aquiline nose, pale thin lips, and deep-set eyes that were small and sea-green, or glaucous, like the eyes of lions or ancient barbarians. I have never seen anyone with eyes such as his. When he was angered, the gleaming pupils seemed to detach themselves and strike you like bullets.
A single passion dominated my father, and that was his passion for the family name. His usual state of being was a profound sadness that deepened with age and a silence broken only by fits of anger. Miserly, in hopes of restoring his family to its former vigor; haughty with other gentlemen at the Estates of Brittany; harsh with his vassals in Combourg; taciturn, despotic, and menacing at home, to see him was to fear him. If he had lived until the Revolution, and if he had been younger, he would have played an important role, or he would have been slaughtered in his castle. He was certainly possessed of genius, and I have no doubt that, had he been a statesman or a general, he would have been an extraordinary man.
It was on returning from America that he thought to marry. Born September 23, 1718, he was thirty-five years old on July 3, 1753, when he wedded Apolline-Jeanne-Suzanne de Bedée, born April 7, 1726, the daughter of Messire Ange-Annibal, Comte de Bedée, Lord of La Bouëtardais. He set up house with her in Saint-Malo, seven or eight leagues from the places where the two of them were born. From the windows of this house, the couple gazed out at the same horizon beneath which they had first entered the world.
My maternal grandmother, Marie-Anne de Ravenel de Boisteilleul, Dame de Bedée, born in Rennes on October 16, 1698, had been raised in Saint-Cyr, in the twilight years of Madame de Maintenon. Her education had been extended to her daughters. My mother, Apolline de Bedée, endowed with great wit and a prodigious imagination, was formed by reading Fénelon, Racine, and Madame de Sévigné. She was nourished on anecdotes of the Court of Louis XIV and knew all of Cyrus by heart. A small woman of large features, dark-haired and ugly, her elegant manners and lively disposition were at odds with my father’s rigidity and calm. Loving society as much as he loved solitude, as exuberant and animated as he was expressionless and cold, she possessed no taste not antagonistic to the tastes of her husband. As time wore on, this constant contrariety made her melancholy, lighthearted and gay though she was. Obliged to hold her tongue when she would rather have spoken, she compensated herself with a sort of noisy sadness interspersed with sighs, the only sounds to interrupt the mute sadness of my father. In the realm of devotion, my mother was an angel.
*A summary of this genealogy can be found in the Histoire généalogique et héraldique des Pairs de France, des grands dignitaires de la Couronne by M. le Chevalier le Courcelles.
† This was written in 1811. (Geneva, 1831)