I REACHED my seventh year, and my mother took me to Plancouët to be released from my nurse’s vow. We stayed there at my grand-mother’s. If I have ever known happiness, it was certainly in that house.
My grandmother lived on the rue du Hameau de L’Abbaye, in a house whose gardens wended down a series of terraces into a dell, at the bottom of which there was a spring encircled by willows. Madame de Bedée could no longer walk, but apart from that she suffered none of the inconveniences of her age. She was a charming old woman: stout, pale, neat, refined. She had beautiful, noble manners, and wore pleated dresses in the old style and a black lace cap that tied beneath the chin. Her wit was polished, her conversation grave, her tone serious. She was cared for by her sister, Mademoiselle de Boisteilleul, who resembled her in nothing except her generosity. Mademoiselle de Boisteilleul was a thin little person: playful, chatty, always bantering. She had been in love with a Comte de Trémignan, who had promised to marry her, but who had subsequently broken that promise. My aunt consoled herself by celebrating her love affair in song, for she was a poetess. I remember having many times heard her snuffling, with her spectacles on her nose and her hands busy embroidering some double ruffles for her sister, a ballad that began—
A sparrowhawk loved a warbler
And the warbler loved him too
—which always seemed to me a very unusual thing for a sparrowhawk to do. The song ended with this refrain:
Oh, Trémignon, Trémignon,
Does the story make you frown?
Oh, Trémignon, Trémignon,
A derry, derry down.
Strange how many things in the world end just like my aunt’s love affair, with a derry, derry down!
My grandmother left the housekeeping to her sister. Every morning she dined at eleven, took a siesta, and woke again at one; she was then carried down the garden terraces to a spot beneath the willows by the spring, where she would knit, surrounded by her sister, her children, and her grandchildren. In those days, old age was a dignity; today it is a burden. At four, the servants carried my grandmother back up to her parlor; Pierre, the footman, brought in the card-table; Mademoiselle de Boisteilleul rapped on the chimneypiece with a pair of iron tongs, and a few moments later three other old maids came in from the neighboring house, in response to my great-aunt’s call. These three sisters were called “the desmoiselles Vildéneux.” Daughters of an impoverished gentleman, rather than dividing their meager inheritance, they had enjoyed it in common: they had never been apart from one another and never left their ancestral village. Since childhood, they had been close with my grandmother, they lived next door to her, and every day, at the established signal from the chimneypiece, they came to play quadrille with their friend. No sooner had the game got underway than the good ladies quarreled: it was the only event in their lives, the only moment when their moods soured. At eight o’clock, supper reestablished peace. Often my uncle de Bedée, together with his son and three daughters, sat down to supper with my grandmother. She would tell story after story from the old days, and my uncle, in his turn, would recount the Battle of Fontenoy, in which he had taken part, and then crown his boasting with a few rather frank anecdotes that made the chaste desmoiselles weak with laughter. At nine, when supper was over, the servants entered; we all of us got down on our knees, and Mademoiselle de Boisteilleul said the evening prayer aloud. By ten, everyone in the house was asleep, except my grandmother, whose maid went on reading to her in bed until one in the morning.
This society, which was the first I knew, was also the first to have disappeared from my sight. I saw death enter that dwelling of peace and benediction, and make of it a lonelier and lonelier place, closing one room after another that would never be opened again. I saw my grandmother forced to give up her quadrille, lacking her usual partners. I saw the number of her old friends dwindle, until the day came when my grandmother was the last to fall. She and her sister had sworn an oath that, as soon as one of them went, she would summon the other, and they kept their word. Madame de Bedée survived Mademoiselle de Boisteilleul by little more than a month. I am perhaps the only man in the world who knows that these people existed. Twenty times since then I have made the same observation; twenty times societies have formed and dissolved around me. This impossibility of duration and continuity in human relations, the profound forgetfulness that follows us wherever we go, the invincible silence that fills our graves and stretches from there to our homes, puts me constantly in mind of our inexorable isolation. Any hand will do to give us the last glass of water we will ever need, when we lie sweating on our deathbed. Only let it not be a hand that we love! For how, without despair, can we let go of a hand that we have covered with kisses, a hand that we would like to hold forever to our heart?
The Comte de Bedée’s house was situated in a high and pleasant spot about a league from Plancouët. Everything about the place exuded joy: my uncle’s good cheer was inexhaustible. He had three daughters, Caroline, Marie, Flore, and a son, the Comte de La Bouëtardais, a councilor in the Parliament, all of whom shared his lavish love of life. Cousins from the countryside flocked to Monchoix, where they played music, danced, hunted, and made merry from morning to night. My aunt, Madame de Bedée, seeing my uncle thus gaily squandering his capital and revenue, quite reasonably quarreled with him; but no one listened, and her low mood only lifted the high spirits of her family, especially since my aunt herself was subject to such a host of crazes: she always had a big snarly hunting dog that slept in her lap and a tamed wild boar that followed her from room to room, filling the château with its grunts. Whenever I went from my father’s somber and silent house to this house of festivity and noise, it was as if I had stumbled into paradise. The contrast was all the more striking later, when my family had moved to the country. Going from Combourg to Monchoix was like going from a wilderness to a great city, from a medieval keep to the villa of a Roman prince.
On Ascension Day 1775, I set out from my grandmother’s house for Notre-Dame de Nazareth with my mother, my aunt de Boisteilleul, my uncle de Bedée and his children, my nurse, and my foster brother. I wore a long white robe, white shoes, white gloves, a white hat, and a blue silk sash. We arrived at the Abbey at ten in the morning. The monastery, which stood by the roadside, was enaged by a quincunx of elms dating from the time of Jean V of Brittany. This quincunx led to the cemetery: a Christian could not reach the church except by crossing this region of headstones. It is through death that man enters into the presence of God.
Already the monks were in their stalls; the altar was lit by a multitude of candles; the lamps hung down from the various vaults: there are, in Gothic buildings, distances something like successive horizons. The mace-bearers came to meet me at the door and ceremoniously conducted me to the choir. Three chairs had been arranged there, and I took my place in the middle one; my nurse sat down on my left, my foster brother on my right.
The Mass began. At the offertory, the celebrant turned toward me and read the prayers. Then my white clothes were removed and hung as an ex-voto beneath a picture of the Virgin, and I was vested anew in a violet-colored frock. The prior delivered a speech on the efficacy of vows; he recalled the story of the Baron de Chateaubriand who had traveled to the Orient with Saint Louis, and told me that one day I too would perhaps visit, in Palestine, that Virgin of Nazareth to whom I owed my life by the intercession of a poor woman’s prayers, which were always powerful to God. This monk, who recounted the history of my family to me, as Dante’s grandfather recounted the history of his ancestors to him, might also, like Cacciaguida, have interwoven a prophecy of my exile:
Tu proverai sì come sa di sale
Lo pane altrui, e com’è duro calle
Lo scendere e il salir per l’atrui scale.
E quel che più ti graverà le spalle,
Sarà la compagnia malvagia e scempia,
Con la qual tu cadrai in questa valle;
Che tutta ingrata, tutta matta ed empia
Si farà contra, a te; . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Di sua bestialitate il suo processo
Farà la prova: sì ch’a te fia bello
Averti fatta parte per te stesso.[14]
“You shall know the salty savor of other people’s bread. You shall know how hard it is going up and down other people’s stairs. And what will weigh still more heavily on your shoulders will be the terrible and senseless company into which you shall fall: all of them ingrates, mad, impious. They shall turn against you. . . . They shall prove their stupidity by their every action, so that you do well to form a party of yourself alone.”
After hearing the Benedictine’s exhortation, I always dreamed of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and in the end I made it.
I have been dedicated to religion; the garments of my innocence have rested on its altars; but it is not my clothing that should be hung there today, it is my miseries.
•
I was brought back to Saint-Malo. Saint-Malo is not the Aleth of the Notitia Imperii.[15] Aleth was better placed by the Romans on the outskirts of Saint-Servan, in the military port called Solidor at the mouth of the Rance. Across from Aleth was a rock, est in conspectu Tenedos,[16] not the refuge of the perfidious Greeks, but the hideaway of Aaron the Hermit, who, in the year 507, established a dwelling place on this island. It was the same year that Clovis triumphed over Alaric. One founded a tiny monastery, the other a great monarchy: two structures that have toppled just the same.
Malo, in Latin Maclovius, Macutus, Machutes, became the Bishop of Aleth in 541. He was drawn there by the fame of Aaron the Hermit, and after this saint died he built a monastic church in praedio Machutis.[17] The name Malo was extended to the island, and later to the town of Maclovium, or Maclopolis.
From Saint Malo, the first bishop of Aleth, to the blessed Jean named “de la Grille,” who was canonized in 1140 and who built the cathedral, there were forty-five bishops. Jean de la Grille, seeing that Aleth was almost totally deserted, transferred the episcopal see from the old Roman town to the new Breton one spreading over Aaron’s rock.
Saint-Malo had much to suffer in the wars waged between the French and English kings.
The Earl of Richmond, later Henry VII of England, with whom the tangles between the White Rose and the Red Rose came to an end, was imprisoned in Saint-Malo. The Duke of Brittany delivered him to Richard III’s ambassadors, who were to take him to London to be killed. But he escaped these guards and took refuge in the cathedral: Asylum quod in eâ urbe est inviolatissum.[18] This right of asylum, or minihi,[19] dated back to the age of the Druids, the first priests of Aaron’s isle.
A Bishop of Saint-Malo was one of the favorites (the other two were Arthur de Montauban and Jean Hingaut) who betrayed the ill-fated Gilles de Bretagne, whose story may be read in the Histoire lamentable de Gilles, seigneur de Chateaubriand et de Chantocé, prince du sang de France et de Bretagne, étranglé en prison par les ministres du favori, le 24 avril 1450.[20]
There was a handsome capitulation between Henri IV and Saint-Malo. The city negotiated power with power, protected those who sought refuge within its walls, and remained free, by ordinance of Philibert de La Guiche, the Grandmaster of the French artillery, to cast one hundred cannonballs. No place more resembled Venice (excepting Venice’s sunshine and its arts) in religion, riches, and maritime chivalry than this little republic of Saint-Malo. It backed Charles V’s expedition to Africa and aided Louis XIII at La Rochelle. It flew its flag over every ocean and established trade with Moka, Surat, and Pondicherry. A company formed in its womb explored the South Seas.
As early as the reign of Henri IV, my native city distinguished itself by its devotion and loyalty to France. The English raided the harbor in 1693; on November 29 of that year, they bombarded it with their infernal machine, in the debris of which I often played with my friends. They bombarded it again in 1758.
The Maloans lent considerable sums to Louis XIV during the War of 1701. In recognition of this sacrifice, he confirmed their right to fortify themselves and ordered that the Royal Navy’s flagship vessel be composed exclusively of sailors from Saint-Malo and its territories.
In 1771, the Maloans repeated their sacrifice and lent thirty million to Louis XV. During the Seven Years’ War, in 1758, the famous Admiral Anson descended on Cancale and burned Saint-Servan. In the Château de Saint-Malo, La Chatolais wrote on linen with a toothpick dipped in water and soot those Memoirs which caused such a stir and which no one even remembers today. Events obscure events; inscriptions engraved over other inscriptions, they form pages in a history of palimpsests.
Saint-Malo once furnished the best sailors in our navy. One can see the extent of their role in a folio volume, published in 1682, under the title Rôle général des officiers, mariniers, et matelots de Saint-Malo. There is also a Coutume de Saint-Malo, printed in the collection of the Coutumier général.[21] The city archives are rich in charts useful to the study of maritime history and rights.
Saint-Malo is the birthplace of Jacques Cartier, the French Christopher Columbus, who discovered Canada. Its sailors have even journeyed west of America to the Îles Malouines that now bear their name.[22] Duguay-Trouin, one of the greatest seamen who have ever lived, was born here, and in my lifetime it has given France Surcouf. The celebrated governor of Île-de-France, Mahé de la Bourdonnais, was born in Saint-Malo, as were La Mettrie, Maupertuis, and that Abbé Trublet whom Voltaire mocked. All this is not bad for an enclosure smaller than the Tuileries garden.
Far ahead of these lesser literary lights of my birthplace stands the Abbé de Lamennais: Broussais also was born here, as was my noble friend the Comte de La Ferronnays.
Finally, in order to omit nothing, I should recall the mastiffs that formed the garrison of Saint-Malo. These were descended from those famous dogs raised among the regiments of the Gauls which, according to Strabo, charged in battle formation with their masters against the Romans. Albertus Magnus, a Dominican monk and a writer just as grave as the Greek geographer, recorded that in Saint-Malo “the protection of so important a place was entrusted each night to the loyalty of certain mastiffs that served as an effective and reliable patrol.” In my day, they were condemned to death for having had the misfortune to snap unthinkingly at the legs of a gentleman, an incident that gave rise to the song “Bon Voyage.” All the dogs are mocked; they are imprisoned as criminals; one of them refuses to take food from the hands of his weeping master, and the noble animal is left to die of hunger. Dogs, like men, are punished for their loyalty. Once the Capitol, like my Delos,[23] was also guarded by dogs, who did not bark when Scipio Africanus came to offer his prayers at dawn.[24]
Enclosed by walls of diverse epochs that are divided into the great and the small, and atop which the townspeople take their strolls, Saint-Malo is still defended by the castle I have already mentioned, and is further fortified by towers, bastions, and moats established by Duchesse Anne. Seen from without, this insular city looks like a granite citadel.
It is on the beach by the open sea, between the castle and the Fort-Royal, that the children congregate; it is there that I grew up, a companion of the winds and the waves. One of the first pleasures that I ever tasted was battling the storms, playing with the breakers that retreated before me or rushed after me along the shore. Another of my pastimes was building, from the gravelly sand of the beach, monuments that my playmates called “ fours.” Since those days, I have often seen castles built for eternity crumble more swiftly than my palaces of sand.
My fate having been irrevocably decided, I was abandoned to an idle childhood. A few notions of drawing, the English language, hydrography, and mathematics seemed more than enough education for a little boy destined in advance for the rough life of a sailor.
I was brought up at home, without any course of study. We were no longer living in the house where I was born. My mother now occupied the first floor of a building in the place Saint-Vincent, almost facing the gate that led to Le Sillon. The town urchins had become my closest friends. I filled the courtyard and the staircases with them, and I came to resemble them in everything. I picked up their language, their mannerisms, their looks. I dressed like them, unbuttoned and unwashed like them. My shirts hung down in rags, and I never had a pair of stockings that wasn’t mostly holes. All day I limped around in wretched, worn-down shoes that slipped off with every step I took. I often lost my hat and sometimes my coat. My face was filthy, scratched, and bruised; my hands were black with dirt. My appearance was so strange that my mother, even in the midst of her anger, could not keep from laughing and crying out, “How ugly he is!”
Yet I loved and have always loved cleanliness, even elegance. At night, I tried to mend my ragged clothes. La Villeneuve and Lucile, in an effort to spare me my mother’s reprovals and punishments, helped me repair my wardrobe; but their patchwork only made my apparel more bizarre. I was especially humiliated when I had to appear in tatters among children proud of their new coats and their finery.
My compatriots had something foreign about them, something Spanish. A few Maloan families had established themselves in Cádiz, and a few families from Cádiz had taken up residence in Saint-Malo. The insular setting, the causeway, the architecture, the houses, the water towers, and the granite walls of Saint-Malo gave it a close resemblance to Cádiz. When later I visited the latter city, on my return from the Orient, I was put in mind of the former.
Closed up in their city each night under the same lock and key, Maloans had become like members of a single family. Their mores were so artless that young women who sent away for ribbons and veils from Paris were considered “worldly” and shunned by their scandalized companions. Adultery was unthinkable. When one Comtesse d’Abbeville was suspected of infidelity, it resulted in a plaintive ballad that one sung while making the sign of the cross. The poet, however, faithful despite himself to the traditions of the troubadours, sided against the husband, and called him a “monstrous barbarian.”
Certain days of the year, the inhabitants of the city and the surrounding country gathered together at fairs called “assemblies,” held in the forts and on the islands around Saint-Malo. One went to them on foot when the water was low and in boats when the water was high. The multitude of sailors and peasants; the covered carts; the caravans of horses, donkeys, and mules; the competing merchants; the tents pitched along the shoreline; the processions of monks and confraternities wending their way through the crowd with their banners and crosses held high; the longboats coming and going by oar or by sail; the ships entering the harbor or anchored in the roadstead; the salvos of artillery and the swinging bells, all contributed their share of noise, motion, and variety to these gatherings.
I was the only witness to these festivities who did not share in the jubilation. I arrived at them with no money to buy toys or cakes. Avoiding the scorn that always attends hard luck, I sat far from the crowd, beside those pools of water that the sea sustains and renews in the hollows of the rocks. There, I amused myself by watching the puffins and the gulls at their flight; I gazed off into the bluish distances; I collected seashells; I closed my eyes and listened to the music of the waves among the reefs. In the evenings at home, I was not much happier. I abhorred certain dishes: I was forced to eat them. I used to implore the eyes of La France, who would skillfully relieve me of my plate the moment my father turned his head. As for the fire, the same austerity applied: I was not permitted even to approach the hearth. It is a long way from these strict parents to the child-spoilers of today.
But if I had sorrows that children now cannot imagine, I also had some pleasures of which the new breed knows nothing.
Gone are those rites of religion and family in which the whole country seemed to rejoice in the presence of its God. Christmas, New Year, Twelfth Night, Easter, Whitsunday, and Midsummer Day were days of plenty for me. Perhaps my native rock has worked upon my feelings and influenced my studies. As long ago as the year 1015, the Maloans made a vow to go help build “with their hands and their means” the belfries of the cathedral at Chartres. Have I not also worked with my hands to restore the fallen spire of the old Christian church?
“The sun,” says Father Maunoir, “has never shone upon a place more steadfast and unwavering in its loyalty to the true faith than Brittany. For thirteen centuries, not one sacrilege has soiled the tongue which has served to spread the word of Jesus Christ; and the man has yet to be born who has heard a Breton-speaking Breton preach any but the Catholic religion.”
On the feasts days that I have just recalled, I would be taken with my sisters to the shrines of the town, to the chapel of Saint Aaron and to the convent of La Victoire, where my ear was struck by the sweet voices of the unseen women: the harmonies of their canticles mingled with the booming of the waves. When, in wintertime, at the hour of the evening service, the cathedral filled with people; when the old sailors got down on their knees and the young women and their children read, by the light of little candles, from the book of hours; when the multitude, at the moment of benediction, repeated in chorus the “Tantum ergo”; when, in the silence between these songs, the Christmastime squalls beat against the basilica’s stained-glass windows and shook the vaults of that nave which had once resounded with the manly voices of Jacques Cartier and Duguay-Trouin, I experienced an extraordinary religious feeling. I did not need Villeneuve to tell me to fold my hands or to call on God by all the names that my mother had taught me. I saw the heavens open and the angels offering up our incense and our prayers, and I bowed my head. It was not yet burdened with those troubles which weigh so horribly upon us that we are tempted never to lift our heads again, when we have bent down at the foot of the altar.
One sailor, on leaving these ceremonies, boarded his ship freshly fortified against the night; another came sailing into the harbor, navigating by the lighted dome of the church. Religion and danger were continually face to face, and their images presented themselves inseparably to my mind. No sooner was I born than I heard talk of death. In the evenings, a man went through the streets ringing a bell, calling Christians to pray for the soul of one of their drowned brethren. Nearly every year a boat sank before my very eyes, and even as I scampered along the beaches the sea rolled the corpses of foreign sailors at my feet. I knew that these men had died far from home. But Madame de Chateaubriand would say to me, as Saint Monica had once said to her son: Nihil longe est a Deo. “Nothing is far from God.”[25] My education had been entrusted to Providence, and Providence did not spare me her lessons.
Having been vowed to the Virgin, I came to know and love my protectress, though at first I confused her with my guardian angel. Her image, which had cost the good Villeneuve half a sou, was affixed by four nails to the wall above my bed. I should have lived in the days when people still spoke to Mary aloud: “Sweet Lady of heaven and earth, mother of mercy, source of all that is good, who bore Jesus Christ in your precious womb, most sweet and beautiful Lady, I thank you and implore you.”
The first thing that I learned by heart was a sailor’s hymn that begins:
Je mets ma confiance,
Vierge, en votre secours;
Servez-moi de défense,
Prenez soin de mes jours;
Et quand ma dernière heure
Viendra finir mon sort,
Obtenez que je meure
De la plus sainte mort.[26]
I have since heard this hymn sung during a shipwreck. Even today, I recite these paltry rhymes with as much pleasure as the verses of Homer. A madonna fitted with a Gothic crown and dressed in a blue silk robe fringed with silver still inspires me with a deeper devotion than any virgin painted by Raphael.
If only that peaceful Star of the Seas could have calmed the turmoil of my life! But I was to be troubled even in my childhood. Like the Arab’s date tree, my trunk had barely sprouted from the rock before it was battered by the wind.