Dieppe, October 1812
I WENT to spend my holidays at Combourg. Château life in the vicinity of Paris can give no idea of château life in a remote province.
The estate of Combourg was no more than a few acres of heath, several mills, and two forests, Bourgouët and Tanoërn, in a region where timber is almost worthless. But Combourg was rich in feudal rights of various kinds. Some of these rights determined certain rents for concessions or regulated customs that had been established under the old political order; others seemed to have been merely amusements from the start.
My father had revived a few of these latter rights in order to prevent their positive prescription. When the whole family was gathered together, we took part in these Gothic entertainments. The three principal ones were the Saut des Poissonniers,[2] the Quintaine, and a fair called the Angevine. Peasants in clogs and breeches, men of a France that no longer exists, would watch the games of a France that had already ceased to be. There was a prize for the victor and a forfeit to be paid by the vanquished.
The Quintaine preserved the tradition of tournaments. No doubt it bore some relation to the ancient military duties of the fiefs. It is very well described by Du Cange (voce Quintana).[3] Forfeits had to be paid in old copper coinage, up to the value of two moutons d’or à la couronne of 25 sols parisis each.
The fair called the Angevine was held in the meadow by the pond every September 4, my birthday. Vassals were required to take up arms and come to the castle to raise the banner of the lord. From there, they went off to the fair to keep order and enforce the collection of a toll due to the Counts of Combourg for every head of cattle: a sort of royalty. During these times, my father kept an open house. For three days, everyone danced: the masters, in the great hall, to the scraping of a fiddle; the vassals, in the Green Court, to the twanging of a bagpipe. Everyone sang, shouted huzzah, and fired arquebuses, and these noises mingled with the lowing of the cattle at the fair. The crowd drifted through the gardens and the woods, and, at least this one time of year, Combourg saw something that resembled joy.
Thus, in my lifetime, I have had the somewhat singular distinction to have been present at the contests of the Quintaine and at the proclamation of the Rights of Man; to have seen both the bourgeois militia of a Breton village and the National Guard of France, the banner of the Seigneurs de Combourg and the flag of the Revolution. It is as if I were the last surviving witness of the feudal ways.
The visitors that we received at the castle were the inhabitants of the town and the aristocrats of the township: these honest people were my first friends. Our vanity sets too much importance on the role that we play in the world. The Parisian bourgeois laughs at the small-town bourgeois; the nobleman at Court mocks the provincial noble; the well-known man disdains the unknown man, forgetting that time will do equal justice to their various pretensions, and that they will all look equally ridiculous or trivial in the eyes of generations to come.
The preeminent inhabitant of Combourg was one M. Potelet, a former sea captain in the East India Company, who used to retell long stories about his days in Pondicherry. As he recounted these tales, his elbows propped on the table, my father always looked as though he wanted to hurl a plate of food at his face. After Potelet came the tobacco bonder, M. Launay de La Billardière, the father of a family of twelve children, like Jacob, although in his case nine girls and three boys, of whom the youngest, David, was my playmate.* The good man took it into his head to become a nobleman in 1789: he had really taken his time! In his household, there was a surplus of happiness and an abundance of debt. These men, together with the seneschal Gébert, the fiscal attorney Petit, the tax collector Le Corvaisier, and the chaplain Abbé Charmel, comprised the high society of Combourg. I did not meet more distinguished people when I visited Athens.
Messrs. Du Petit-Bois, de Château-d’Assie, de Tinteniac, and one or two other gentlemen came on Sundays to hear Mass in the parish and afterward dined with the lord of the manor. We were particularly close with the Trémaudan family: a husband, his extremely pretty wife, her sister, and several children. This family inhabited a farm where the only sign of their nobility was a dovecote and where they remain to this day. Wiser and happier than I, the Trémaudans have never lost sight of the towers of that castle I left more than thirty years ago; they continue to live as they lived when I went to eat brown bread at their table; they have never abandoned that refuge which I shall never see again. Perhaps they are speaking of me at this very moment, as I write this page: I reproach myself for dragging their name out of its protective obscurity. They doubted for a long time that the man about whom they heard so much was the petit chevalier that they used to know. The rector or curé of Combourg, Abbé Sévin, to whose sermons I used to listen, showed a similar incredulity. He could not be persuaded that a scamp who had been the friend of peasants became the defender of the Christian religion. At last, he came to believe, and now he quotes me in his sermons, whereas once he bounced me on his knees. These worthy people, whose image of me is not clouded with any strange ideas, who see me as I was in my boyhood and youth—would they recognize me today, after all the travesties of time? I’m afraid I would have to tell them my name before they clasped me in their arms.
I bring misfortune to my friends. A gamekeeper at Combourg named Raulx, who grew fond of me, was killed by a poacher. This murder made an extraordinary impression on me. What a strange mystery is human sacrifice! Why must it be that the greatest crime and the greatest glory lie in shedding man’s blood? In my mind’s eye, I used to picture Raulx, clutching his entrails in his hands, limping toward the cottage where he died; I plotted to avenge him, and would even have liked to fight the murderer myself. In this respect, I am singularly made: at the moment of the offense I hardly feel it, but it engraves itself in my memory, and the remembrance of it, instead of waning, waxes with time. It stays in my heart for months or years, and then wakes with fresh force in the least expected circumstances, when my wound becomes keener than on the first day. But if I never forgive my enemies, I never do them any harm either. I am rancorous but not at all vindictive. If I have the power to revenge myself, I lose the desire: I could only be dangerous in misfortune. Those who have thought to make me yield by oppressing me have been deceived. Adversity is to me what the earth was to Antaeus: I gather strength at my mother’s breast. If happiness ever took me in its arms, I would suffocate.
*I would meet my friend David again: I shall soon say when and how. (Geneva, 1832)