Vallée-aux-Loups, January 1812
ON LEAVING my mother’s womb, I underwent my first exile: I was relegated to Plancouët, a pretty village situated between Dinan, Saint-Malo, and Lamballe. Close to this village, my mother’s only brother, the Comte de Bedée, had built the Château de Monchoix. My maternal grandmother’s properties in the region extended to the market town of Corseul: the Curiosolites of Caesar’s Commentaries.[8] My grandmother, who by then had been a widow for a long time, lived with her sister, Mademoiselle de Boisteilleul, in a hamlet separated from Plancouët by a bridge and called L’Abbaye, after its Benedictine abbey, which was consecrated to Notre-Dame de Nazareth.
My wet nurse was found to be barren, and another poor Christian took me to her breast. She vowed my soul to the patron of the hamlet, Notre-Dame de Nazareth, and promised that, in her honor, I would wear blue and white until I reached the age of seven. I had been alive no more than a few hours, and already the weight of time was on my brow. Why was I not allowed to die? Somehow it entered into God’s plans to grant this obscure and innocent prayer and preserve a life that a vain reputation later threatened to overtake.
This Breton peasant’s vow is no longer of our century; but it was a touching thing, the intervention of a Mother on high, mediating between a child and heaven, and sharing in the worries of a mother on earth.
After three years, I was taken back to Saint-Malo. It had already been seven years since my father, wishing to forge a new entry into one of those places where his ancestors had lived and died, regained the estate of Combourg. Unable to negotiate for the lordship of Beaufort, which had passed to the family Goyon, or for the barony of Chateaubriand, which had fallen to the house of Condé, he set his sights on Combourg, a name that Froissart spells Combour and that several branches of my family had already possessed by marriage with the Coëtquens. Combourg defended Brittany against both the Normans and the English: it was built by Junken, Bishop of Dol, in 1016, although its tallest tower dates from 1100. The Marshal de Duras, who had acquired Combourg through his wife, Maclovie de Coëtquen, whose mother was a Chateaubriand, made the arrangements with my father. It was this same Marshal de Duras, acting as our kinsman, who would later present my brother and me to Louis XVI.
I was destined for the Royal Navy: estrangement from the Court came naturally to all Bretons, and particularly to my father. The aristocracy of the Estates of Brittany only served to fortify this feeling.
When I was brought back to Saint-Malo, my father was already in Combourg, my brother was at the Collège de Saint-Brieuc, and my four sisters were living with my mother. All the latter’s affections were concentrated on her eldest son. This is not to say that she didn’t cherish her other children, but she exhibited a blind preference for the young Comte de Combourg. As a boy, as a latecomer, and as le chevalier (so they called me), it’s true that I had some privileges over my sisters. But for the most part I was left in the hands of servants. My mother, a woman of wit and virtue, was preoccupied by the demands of society and the duties of religion. The Comtesse de Plouër, my godmother, was her close companion; she also used to visit with relatives of Maupertuis and the Abbé Trublet. She loved people, gossip, and politics; and they played politics in Saint-Malo like the monks of Saba in the Ravine of Cedron.[9] She threw herself fervently into the La Chatolais affair.[10] But she brought home a shrewish temper, a distracted mind, and a parsimonious spirit which at first prevented us from recognizing her more admirable qualities. She was orderly, but her children were raised in disorder; she was generous, but she gave the impression of being a penny-pincher; she was gentle, but she was always scolding. If my father was the terror of the servants, my mother was the scourge.
Such were the dispositions of my parents, from which the first feelings of my life were born. I became attached to the woman who looked after me, an excellent creature called La Villeneuve, whose name I write now with a rush of gratitude and with tears in my eyes. La Villeneuve was a sort of superintendent of the household, always carrying me around in her arms, giving me treats on the sly, wiping away my tears, kissing me, putting me down in a corner, picking me up again, and muttering all the while: “This little one here won’t be proud! He has a good heart! He doesn’t snub the poor folk! Do you now, little one?” And she would stuff my mouth with wine and sugar.
My childish sympathies for La Villeneuve were soon surpassed by a worthier friendship.
Lucile, the fourth of my sisters, was two years older than I. She was a neglected youngest daughter, and her wardrobe consisted solely of her sisters’ cast-off clothes. Imagine a thin little girl, too tall for her age, with gangling arms and a timid gaze, who speaks only with difficulty and cannot learn a thing; dress her in a borrowed frock a size too small for her; bind her chest in a piqué corset whose stays leave wounds in her sides; gird her neck in an iron collar with brown velvet trim; coil her hair atop her head and tuck it up beneath a black cloth toque, and you shall have some idea of the miserable creature who greeted me beneath my father’s roof. No one could have suspected that this puny Lucile would one day be a woman of superior talent and beauty.
She was handed over to me like a plaything, but I did not at all abuse my power. Instead of making her bend to my will, I made myself her defender. Every morning, I was taken with her to the house of the Couppart sisters, two old hunchbacks dressed all in black, who taught children how to read. Lucile was very bad at reading: I was still worse. The sisters scolded her, I scratched at them, and great complaints were brought before my mother. I began to pass for a scapegrace, a rebel, a layabout, ultimately an ass. These ideas were soon entrenched in my parents’ minds. My father said that all the Chevaliers de Chateaubriand had been moochers, drunks, and brawlers. My mother sighed and grumbled at the sight of my filthy coat. Child though I was, I felt revolted by my father’s remarks, and when my mother crowned her remonstrances by singing the praises of my brother, whom she called a Cato, a hero, I felt disposed to do every wicked thing that seemed expected of me.
My writing teacher, Monsieur Després, with his old-fashioned sailor’s wig, was no more satisfied with me than my parents were. He made me copy interminably, after a sample of his own style, these two lines that I held in horror, though by no fault of the language itself:
C’est à vous mon esprit à qui je veux parler:
Vous avez des défauts que je ne puis celer.[11]
He would accompany his reprimands by hitting me in the neck with his fist and calling me a “lardhead.” Did he mean to say a “hardhead”?* I don’t know what a lardhead is, but I have always imagined it to be something terrifying.[12]
Saint-Malo is nothing but a rock. In former times, this rock stood in the middle of a salt marsh. Then, in 709, the seas erupted and deepened the bay: Saint-Malo became an island and Mont-Saint-Michel was set in its place among the waves. Today, the rock of Saint-Malo is kept on terra firma only by a causeway, poetically called “Le Sillon.”[13] On one side, Le Sillon is assailed by the open sea; on the other, it is washed by the tides which turn there and run into the harbor. A tempest almost completely destroyed it in 1730. During the hours of low tide, the harbor dries out, and along the northern and eastern shoreline is a very fine sand beach. It is then possible to make a tour of my paternal nest. Near and far are scattered rocks, forts, and uninhabited islets: Fort-Royal, La Conchée, Cézembre, and Le Grand-Bé, where my grave will be. I have chosen well without knowing it, for bé, in Breton, means tomb.
At the end of Le Sillon, planted with a cross, is a sand dune called La Hoguette, which stands at the edge of the open sea. Atop this dune is an old gallows: as children, we used to play games of four corners among its posts, disputing possession with the shorebirds. It was never, however, without a certain sense of terror that we loitered in this spot.
Here, too, are the Miels, the dunes where the sheep once grazed; to the right are the meadows that lie below Paramé, the post-road to Saint-Servan, the new cemetery, a calvary cross, and the windmills on the dunes, which are like those windmills above Achilles’ tomb at the mouth of the Hellespont.
*Άχώρ, gourme.