La Vallée-aux-Loups, December 31, 1811
IN SAINT-MALO, my mother gave birth to a son who died in the cradle. He was named Geoffroy, like nearly all the eldest sons of my family. This boy was followed by another and by two girls, none of whom lived for more than a few months.
These four children died of an effusion of blood in the brain. At last, my mother brought into the world a third boy, named Jean-Baptiste. It was he who, by and by, would become the grandson-in-law of M. de Malesherbes. After Jean-Baptiste came four girls: Marie-Anne, Bénigne, Julie, and Lucile, all four of a rare beauty, and of whom only the two eldest survived the Revolution’s storms. Beauty, a serious trifle, remains when all else has passed away. I was the last of these ten children. Probably my four sisters owed their existence to my father’s desire to ensure his name by the birth of a second son. I resisted. I had an aversion to life.
My baptismal certificate reads as follows:
François-René de Chateaubriand, son of René de Chateaubriand and of Pauline-Jeanne-Suzanne de Bedée, his wife, born September 4, 1768, baptized the following day by us, Pierre-Henry Nouail, High Vicar to the Bishop of Saint-Malo. Serving as godfather was Jean-Baptiste de Chateaubriand, his brother, and as godmother, Françoise-Gertrude de Contades. Acting as signatories for the registry: Contades de Plouër, Jean-Baptiste de Chateaubriand, Brignon de Chateaubriand, de Chateaubriand et Nouail, vicar-general.
One can see that I was mistaken in my earlier writings: I was born September 4, not October 4, and my Christian names are François René, not François-Auguste.*
The house where my parents then lived stands in a gloomy, narrow street of Saint-Malo called the rue des Juifs. It has since been transformed into an inn. The room where my mother gave birth overlooks a bare stretch of the city walls, and through the windows of this room one has a view of the sea outspread to the horizon and crashing on the reefs. My godfather, as my baptismal certificate shows, was my brother; my godmother, the Comtesse de Plouër, the daughter of Marshal de Contades. I was nearly dead when I came into the world. The booming of the waves, stirred up by one of those squalls that herald the autumn equinox, drowned my cries. These details were often repeated to me, and their sadness has never been effaced from my memory. Not a day passes when, reflecting on what I have been, I do not see in my mind’s eye the rock where I was born, the room where my mother inflicted life on me, the raging tempest that was my first lullaby, the doomed brother who gave me a name that I have almost always dragged through disaster. Heaven itself seemed to arrange these circumstances to place in sight of my cradle an emblem of my destinies.
*Twenty days before me, on August 15, 1768, on another island, at the other end of France, a man was born who would put an end to the old society: Bonaparte.