I WAS TO follow my sisters to Combourg: we set out in the first fortnight of May. At sunrise one morning we left Saint-Malo, my mother, my four sisters, and I, in an enormous old-fashioned Berlin with gilded panels, exterior footboards, and purple tassels hanging from the four corners of the carriage. Eight horses, bedecked like Spanish mules, with large bells draped around their necks and smaller ones fastened to their bridles, sporting many-colored housings and woolen fringe, dragged us on our way. While my mother sighed and my sisters chattered without pausing once for breath, I looked with both my eyes, I listened with both my ears, and I marveled at every turn of the wheel: the first step of a Wandering Jew who would never afterward manage to stop. Still, if a man only changed his place! But his life and his heart change too.
Our horses were rested in a fishing village on the beach at Cancale; then we crossed the marshes, through the feverish town of Dol, and, passing the door of the school to which I was soon to return, we plunged deeper and deeper into the inland country.
For ten mortal miles we saw nothing but uplands bordered by woods, fallow fields that had scarcely been cleared, rows of black wheat-stubble and indigent oats. Charcoal-burners led strings of scrawny ponies with tangled manes. Longhaired peasants in goatskin tunics drove emaciated oxen with shrill cries or trudged in the wake of heavy plows, like so many laboring fauns. At long last, we came to a valley, at the bottom of which, not far from a pond, there rose the single spire of a village church. The towers of a feudal castle loomed above a copse of trees lighted by the fires of the setting sun.
I had to stop myself just now. My heart was beating so hard that it shook the table on which I write these words. The memories reawakening in my brain overwhelm me with their number and their power; and yet what can they mean to the rest of the world?
At the foot of the hill, we forded a stream. After another half hour, we left the highway, and the carriage rolled along the edge of a quincunx into an avenue of trees whose branches interlaced over our heads. I can still remember the moment I entered under that shade and the dreadful joy that I felt there.
Leaving the darkness of the woods, we crossed a forecourt planted with walnut trees which led to the steward’s house and the garden. From there, we went through a little gate into a grassy courtyard called the Green Court: to the right were a row of stables and a stand of chestnuts; to the left, another stand of chestnuts; and at the far end of the courtyard, which sloped almost imperceptibly upward, the castle stood between two clumps of trees. Its bleak and melancholy façade was dominated by a curtain-wall supporting a machicolated gallery, enameled and denticulated, that linked together two large towers of disparate age, height, girth, and material. These towers were topped with crenellations and surmounted by pointed roofs, like bonnets set upon Gothic crowns.
Barred windows were visible here and there in the bare walls. A large staircase of twenty-two steps, steep and wide, without banister or parapet, had been built over the filled-in moat where the drawbridge used to be. These stairs led up to the main door of the castle, carved into the middle of the curtain-wall. Over this door, the coat of arms of the “Seigneurs de Chateaubriand” hung between the fissures through which the arms and chains of the drawbridge once had passed.
The carriage stopped at the foot of the staircase, and my father came down the steps to meet us. The reunion of his family so softened his mood for the moment that he favored us with the most gracious expressions. We climbed the staircase and proceeded into an echoing anteroom with a high, ribbed ceiling, and from this anteroom onward into a small interior courtyard. From there, we entered the block that faced south over the pond and adjoined the two small towers. The castle, taken all together, had the shape of a four-wheeled chariot. We found ourselves on the ground floor, in a room formerly known as the “Salle des Gardes.” There was a window at each end of this room and two more that had been carved into the side wall: in order to enlarge these windows, it had been necessary to chisel through eight or ten feet of stone. Two corridors that sloped gradually upward, like the corridor of the Great Pyramid, led from the far corners of the room to the two small towers, and a staircase, spiraling inside one of these towers, established relations between the Salle des Gardes and the upper story.
The block between the high tower and the fat tower, which faced north over the Green Court, consisted of a sort of dark, square dormitory that served as a kitchen; there was also an anteroom, a staircase, and a chapel. Above these rooms was the Salon des Archives, des Armoires, des Oiseaux, or des Chevaliers, so called because of its ceiling, which was covered with colorful escutcheons and painted birds. So deep were the narrow embrasures of its trefoiled windows that they formed closets bound by granite benches hewn into the walls. Add to all this, in various parts of the building, secret passageways and stairwells, dungeons and keeps, a labyrinth of covered and uncovered galleries, walled-up subterranean passages whose ramifications were unknown, and everywhere silence, darkness, and a face of stone—and there you have the Château de Combourg.
A supper served in the Salle des Gardes, which I ate without constraint, brought the first happy day of my life to a close. True happiness is cheap; if costly, it is not the real thing at all.
The next morning, the moment I opened my eyes, I went out to inspect the castle grounds and celebrate my accession to solitude. Seated on the diazoma of the staircase, facing northwest, I saw before me the Green Court, and beyond this court, a kitchen garden planted between two groves of trees. The one on the right (the quincunx by which we had arrived) was called the “Little Mall”; the other, on the left, the “Grand Mall.” This latter grove consisted of a forest of oaks, beeches, sycamores, elms, and chestnuts. In her day, Madame de Sévigné was already praising these ancient trees for their shade: since then, one hundred and forty years had been added to their beauty.[31]
On the opposite side, to the south and east, the country presented an altogether different picture. Through the windows of the great hall, one could see the houses of Combourg, a pond, and on the causeway above this pond the highway to Rennes, a water mill, and a meadow covered with herds of cattle and separated from the pond by the road. At the edge of the meadow was a hamlet attached to a priory, founded in 1149 by Rivallon, Seigneur de Combourg, and inside which his mortuary statue lay peacefully asleep, supine, in knightly armor. Up from the pond and the priory the terrain steadily inclined, forming an amphitheater of trees above which the belfries of the village and the turrets of neighboring manors jutted into the sky. On a last plane of the horizon, to the southwest, were the silhouetted heights of Bécherel. A terrace bordered with large manicured boxwoods wrapped around the foot of the castle on this side, passed behind the stables, and descended, by various turnings, to join the water garden that gave onto the Grand Mall.
If, following this overlong description, a painter were to take his pencil in hand, would he would produce a sketch in any way resembling my father’s castle? I don’t believe he would. Yet my memory beholds the place as though it were before my very eyes. Such is the weakness of words and the strength of memory in the face of material things. In beginning to speak of Combourg, I sing the first lines of a ballad that charms no one but me. Ah, well! Ask a goatherd in the Tyrol why he takes such delight in those three or four notes that he keeps repeating to his animals, those alpine melodies that cast echo after echo, resounding from one bank of a mountain stream to the other.
My first appearance at Combourg was of short duration. Two weeks had scarcely passed before I saw the arrival of the Abbé Porcher, the principal of the Collège de Dol. I was delivered into his hands, and I followed him in spite of my tears.