Dieppe, September 1812;
Revised in June 1846
I WAS NOT entirely a stranger to Dol. My father was a canon there, as he was a descendant and representative of the house of Guillaume de Chateaubriand, Lord of Beaufort, who, in 1529, founded the first stall in the choir of the cathedral. The Bishop of Dol was M. de Hercé, a friend of my family and a prelate of quite moderate political views who, on his knees, crucifix in hand, was shot with his brother, the Abbé de Hercé, at Quiberon, in the Field of the Martyrs. On arriving at school, I was placed under the private guardianship of M. l’Abbé Leprince, who taught rhetoric and possessed a thorough knowledge of geometry. A witty man with a handsome face, a lover of the arts and a painter of fairly good portraits, he was charged with teaching me my Bézout.[1] The Abbé Égault, the master of the third-years, became my Latin instructor. So it was that I studied mathematics in my dormitory and Latin in the schoolroom.
It took some time for an owl of my species to accustom himself to the cage of a college and regulate his flight to the sound of school bells. I could find none of those ready friends that wealth allows you, for there was nothing to be gained from friendship with a poor scamp who didn’t even have a weekly allowance. Still, I did not enroll myself in any clique, for I hate protectors. On the playing fields, I made no effort to lead others, but neither would I be led: I was unfit to be a tyrant or a slave, and so I have remained.
It soon happened, however, that I became the leader of a group; I would later exert a similar power over my regiment: simple sublieutenant though I was, the senior officers would spend their evenings with me and preferred my apartment to the café downstairs. I don’t know why this should be, unless perhaps it has something to do with my ability to enter the minds and understand the ways of others. I have loved hunting and sailing as much as I have loved reading and writing. Even today, it makes no difference to me whether I speak of the commonest things or discuss the loftiest subjects. I am not much interested in wit; it is almost repugnant to me, although I am hardly a brute. No human failings shock me, except mockery and self-conceit, which I am always at great pains not to attack. I find that others are always superior to me in something, and if by chance I feel that I have an advantage over them, I am altogether embarrassed.
Certain qualities that my early upbringing had left dormant awoke in me at the Collège de Dol. My capacity for work was remarkable, and my memory was extraordinary. I made rapid progress in mathematics, a subject to which I brought a clarity of comprehension that astounded the Abbé Leprince. At the same time, I showed a decided taste for languages. The rudiments that torment most schoolboys cost me nothing to acquire, and I awaited Latin lessons with a kind of impatience, as a form of relaxation after my equations and geometrical figures. In less than a year, I was ranked high in the fifth form. By some singular quirk, my Latin phrases fell so naturally into pentameters that Abbé Égault took to calling me “the Elegist,” a name that took hold among my classmates.
As for my memory, here are two of its features. First, I learned my logarithm tables by heart: that is to say, when a number was given in a geometrical series, I could name its exponent in the corresponding arithmetical series, and vice versa, from memory.
Here is an illustration of the second. After evening prayers, which were recited together in the school chapel, the principal gave a sermon. One of the boys, picked at random, would be required to summarize it. We came into the chapel exhausted from playing and dying to sleep; we hurled ourselves into the pews, trying to hide in some dark corner to avoid being seen and consequently interrogated. There was above all a confessional booth that we fought over as the surest hiding place. One evening, I had the good luck of winning this refuge, and I considered myself safe from the principal. Unfortunately, he detected my strategy and decided to make an example of me. And so, slowly and deliberately, he read the second part of his sermon. Everyone fell asleep. I know not what led me to stay awake in the confessional, but the principal, who could see only the soles of my feet, believed that I was dozing like the others, and suddenly he called my name. He asked me what it was he had been reading.
The second part of the sermon had involved an enumeration of the various ways in which one can offend God. Now, not only did I relate the substance of the thing, but I recalled the divisions of the argument in their original order and repeated almost word for word several pages of mystical prose, all of which was unintelligible to a child. A murmur of applause ran through the chapel, and the principal called me up to give me a little pat on the cheek and allowed me, as a reward, to stay in bed the next day until the midday meal. I modestly shrugged off the admiration of my classmates, and I profited fully from the grace accorded me. This memory for language, which has not entirely stayed with me, has given way to another, more singular kind of memory, of which I may soon have occasion to speak.
One thing humiliates me, however. Memory is often a quality associated with stupidity. It usually belongs to slow-witted souls whom it renders still slower by the baggage it loads on them. And yet, without memory, what would we be? We would forget our friendships, our loves, our pleasures, our affairs; the genius would not be able to collect his thoughts, and the most affectionate heart would lose its tenderness, if they did not remember. Our existence would be reduced to the successive moments of an endlessly flowing present, and there would be no more past. What a misery is man! Our life is so vain that it is no more than a reflection of our memory.