La Vallée-aux-Loups, June 1812
I HAVE said that my precocious revolt against Lucile’s teachers gave rise to my bad reputation. Now I shall tell how a friend completed it.
My uncle, M. de Chateaubriand du Plessis, also lived in Saint-Malo, and, like his brother, he had four daughters and two sons. My cousins, Pierre and Armand, were at first my comrades; but Pierre went off to become a page to the Queen, and Armand, destined for the priesthood, was sent away to school. Years later, after leaving the Queen’s service, Pierre joined the navy and drowned off the coast of Africa; Armand, after more than a decade cloistered in his school, left France in 1790, served the whole length of the Emigration, made a dozen intrepid voyages to the coast of Brittany in a rowboat, and finally came to die for the King on the Plain of Grenelle, on Good Friday, 1809, as I have already said, and as I shall say again when recounting his ruin.*
Deprived of the company of my two cousins, I replaced it with a new acquaintance.
On the second floor of our building, there lived a gentleman named Gesril who had one son and two daughters. This son had been brought up quite differently than I had. He was a spoiled child, and whatever he did was found charming. He liked nothing so much as to fight and above all to provoke quarrels of which he then made himself the arbiter. He was forever playing nasty tricks on the nurses when they took the children out for walks, and it was never long before these pranks, transformed into the blackest crimes, were the talk of the town. His father laughed at all of it. The naughtier Joson was, the more he was loved. This boy soon became my constant companion, and the ascendancy he gained over me was incredible. I learned something from this master, even though my character was entirely the opposite of his. I loved solitary games and looked for a quarrel with no one: Gesril was mad for the thrills of the crowd and exulted in boyish brawls. When some street urchin spoke to me, Gesril would ask, “You’re going to allow that?”
At this, I would believe my honor compromised and hurl myself at the impudent one with no regard for his age or size. My friend applauded my courage, but he always remained a spectator of the scuffle and made no move to help me. Sometimes, he raised an army of all the little guttersnipes he met, divided his conscripts into two bands, and had us skirmish on the beach with stones.
Another game that Gesril devised was still more dangerous. When the sea was high and a tempest raging, the waves, churning against the foot of the castle on the side of the long beach, leapt to the level of the great towers. Twenty feet above the base of one of these towers was a granite parapet, narrow and slippery, which sloped down to the ravelin that defended the moat. The trick was to seize the instant between two waves and cross the perilous thing before the next wave broke and engulfed the tower. If you dared to look, you would see a mountain of water advancing toward you, roaring as it came, and you would know that if you hesitated even for a moment this water could either drag you away or crush you against the wall. Not one of us would refuse the challenge, though I saw some boys go pale before the attempt.
This penchant for pushing others into adventures of which he remained a spectator might lead one to think that Gesril would later show himself to be an ungenerous man. It was nevertheless he who, on a smaller stage, perhaps eclipsed the heroism of Regulus: he only lacked Rome and Livy to ensure his glory. He became an officer in the navy, and was taken prisoner at the Quiberon landing.[27] When the action was over and the English went on cannonading the Republican army, Gesril flung himself into the sea, swam out toward the ships, and shouted to the English to cease fire. He told them that the émigrés had suffered grave misfortune and had surrendered. The English sailors wanted to save him and threw him a rope, urging him to climb aboard. “I am a prisoner on parole!” he shouted from the water, and began swimming back to shore. He was shot with Sombreuil and his companions.
Gesril was my first friend. Both misjudged in our childhoods, we were bound together by an intuition of what we might one day become.
Two adventures brought an end to this first part of my story and produced a notable change in the method of my education.
One Sunday we were on the beach, at the “fantail” of the Porte Saint-Thomas along Le Sillon, where big stakes had been hammered into the sand to shield the walls against the surging sea. We often used to clamber atop these stakes to watch the first undulations of high tide flow beneath us. On this day, we took our places as usual, several little girls mixed in with the little boys. Of the boys, I took the post farthest out to sea, so that I had no one in front of me except a pretty little girl, named Hervine Magon, who was laughing with pleasure and at the same time crying with fear. Gesril took his post at the other end, nearest the town. The tide was coming in, the wind was picking up, and already the maids and servants were shouting: “Come down, Mademoiselle! Come down, Monsieur!” Gesril had been waiting for a big wave. The moment it rushed in between the piles, he pushed the child seated in front of him; this one tumbled onto the next one; that one onto another. The whole line was collapsing like a row of dominoes, but with each child held in place by his neighbor. There was only the little girl at the end of the line, onto whom I capsized, who had no one to lean on, and fell. The backswirl dragged her away. At once there were a thousand cries, and a horde of maids hitched up their skirts, waded into the sea, seized their little marmots, and boxed their ears. Hervine was fished out; but she insisted that François had pushed her down. The maids fell upon me, but I escaped them. I ran home and barricaded myself in the cellar, with the female army at my heels. Fortunately, my mother and father were out. La Villeneuve valiantly defended the door and slapped the enemy’s vanguard. The real author of the trouble, Gesril, also lent his assistance. He scrambled up to his room and, with his two sisters, dumped jugfuls of water and baked apples through the windows on the assailants. They raised the siege at nightfall; but the news spread through town that the Chevalier de Chateaubriand, aged nine, was a cruel man, a mortal remnant of those pirates that Saint Aaron had purged from his rock.
Here is the other adventure:
I was going with Gesril to Saint-Servan, a suburb separated from Saint-Malo by the trading port. In order to get there at low tide, one crosses currents of water over narrow bridges built of flat stones which vanish when the tide comes in. The servants who accompanied us were lagging far behind, when, at the end of one of these bridges, we spotted two cabin boys coming our way. Gesril turned to me and said, “Are we going to let these fleabags pass?” And straightaway he shouted at them, “Into the water, ducklings!” But these ducklings, being cabin boys, did not see the joke and continued toward us. Gesril retreated. We took a position at the far end of the bridge and, grabbing up some pebbles, hurled them at the cabin boys’ heads. They fell upon us, forced us to give ground, armed themselves with fistfuls of gravel, and drove us back to our reserve corps, which is to say our servants. I was not, like Horatius, wounded in the eye; but a stone had struck me so violently that my left ear, half detached, hung down on my shoulder.
I thought nothing of my injury, but only of returning home. When my friend returned from his escapades with a black eye and a torn coat, he was comforted, cuddled, coddled, and given a fresh change of clothes. Under similar circumstances, I was punished. The blow that I had received was dangerous, but nothing La France could say would persuade me to go home, so frightened was I by the thought of it. Instead, I went and hid on the second floor of the house with Gesril, who wrapped my head in a towel. The towel put him in a good mood. It reminded him of a mitre. He transformed me into a bishop and made me recite the High Mass with him and his sisters until suppertime. The pontiff was then obliged to go downstairs, his heart pounding. My father, though taken aback by my drained and bloodstained face, said not a word. My mother shrieked. La France pleaded my pitiful case and made excuses for me, but I was chided nonetheless. My ear was bandaged, and Monsieur and Madame de Chateaubriand resolved to separate me from Gesril at once.†
I believe that same year the Comte d’Artois came to Saint-Malo and was treated to the spectacle of a naval battle. Looking down from the bastion of the powder-magazine, I caught sight of the young prince in the crowd on the seashore. He was in his radiance, and I was in the shadows, but between us—what unknown workings of fate! Thus, unless my memory fails me, Saint-Malo has seen only two Kings of France: Charles IX and Charles X.
•
Here you have a picture of my earliest childhood. I do not know whether the harsh education I received is sound in principle, but it was adopted by my parents for no fixed reason and as a natural result of their temperaments. What is certain is that it made my ideas less similar to those of other men; what is still more certain is that it imprinted my feelings with a melancholy stamp—a melancholy born of habitual suffering in the years of weakness, recklessness, and joy.
Do you say that my upbringing must have led me to detest the authors of my early days? Not at all. The memory of their strictness is almost dear to me. I honor and esteem their good qualities. When my father died, my comrades in the Navarre Regiment bore witness to my grief. To my mother, I owe the consolation of my life, since it was through her that I took my faith: I gathered the Christian truths that came from her lips, as Pierre de Langres studied at night in his church, by the light of the lamp that burned before the Blessed Sacrament. Would my mind have been better developed if I had been plunged into my studies earlier? I doubt it. The waves, the winds, and the solitude that served as my first masters were perhaps better suited to my native dispositions. Perhaps I owe these wild instructors some virtues that I would otherwise lack. The truth is that no system of education is in itself preferable to any other system. Do children love their parents more today, now that they address them as tu and no longer fear them? Gesril was spoiled in the same house where I was chastised, but we have both been honest men and respectful, loving sons. The things that you consider wicked may bring out your child’s talents; the things that you find good may stifle them. God does well whatever He does. It is Providence that guides us when she destines us to play a role on the world’s stage.
*Armand left behind a son named Frédéric, for whom I secured a place in the Guards of Monsieur, and who later entered a regiment of cuirassiers. In Nancy, Frédéric married Mademoiselle de Gastaldi, by whom he had two sons, and thereafter retired from the service. Armand’s elder sister is and for many years now has been a Mother Superior in a Trappist convent. (Geneva, 1831)
† I have already spoken of Gesril in my works. One of his sisters, Angélique Gesril de La Trochardais, wrote me in 1818 to ask me to obtain permission for her husband and her sister’s husband to add the name “Gesril” to their surnames. My negotiations ran aground. (Geneva, 1831)