Dieppe, October 1812
I RETURNED to Dol, to my great regret. The following year, there were plans to attack the island of Jersey. A camp was established near Saint-Malo, and troops were stationed in Combourg. Out of courtesy, M. de Chateaubriand put up the colonels of the Touraine and Conti regiments: one was the Duc de Saint-Simon and the other the Marquis de Causans.* Every day, a dozen officers were invited to share my father’s table. The chatter of these strangers upset me, and their strolls disturbed the peace of my woods. It was through seeing the lieutenant colonel of the Conti Regiment, the Marquis de Wignacourt, galloping beneath the trees, that the idea of travel first crossed my mind.
As I listened to our guests talk of Paris and the Court, I grew despondent. I tried to divine what society was and discovered only something blurred and distant; I was soon bewildered. From the tranquil realms of innocence, I cast my eyes on the world and felt a sort of vertigo, as if I were looking down at the earth from one of those towers that vanish in the sky.
One thing delighted me, however, and that was the parade. Every day, the guard, led by a drummer and a band, would march at the foot of the staircase in the Green Court. When M. de Causans offered to take me to see the camp on the coast, my father gave his consent.
I was driven to Saint-Malo by M. de la Morandais, a gentleman of good family whom poverty had reduced to being the steward of the Combourg estate. He wore a gray woolen coat with a thin silver band around the collar, and a gray felt cap with earflaps and a single peak in front. He saddled me behind him on the crupper of his isabella mare, and I held on to the belt of his hunting knife, which he fastened outside his coat: I was ecstatic. When Claude de Bullion and Chairman Lamoignon’s father were taken to the country as children, “they were carried in baskets, the two of them on either side of the same donkey, and, because Lamoignon was lighter than his comrade, a loaf of bread was put in with him as a counter-weight” (Mémoires du président de Lamoignon).
M. de La Morandais took backroads all the way:
Moult volontiers, de grand’manière,
Alloit en bois et en rivière;
Car nulles gens ne vont en bois
Moult volontiers comme François.[4]
We stopped for dinner at a Benedictine abbey, whose monks, for want of the requisite number, had recently been sent to join the chief residence of the order. The only man left there was the bursar, who had been charged with overseeing the sale of the abbey’s furniture and the exploitation of its trees. He provided us with an excellent Friday dinner in what had formerly been the Prior’s library: we ate a quantity of new-laid eggs with huge carp and pike. Through the arcade of a cloister, I could see a few tall sycamores along a pond. An ax struck at the foot of one of these trees; its top trembled in the air, and down it fell, as if to provide us with midday entertainment. Carpenters from Saint-Malo sawed off its green branches, as one trims a youthful head of hair, and squared away its toppled trunk. My heart bled at the sight of the ruptured forest and the disinhabited monastery. The widespread sacking of religious houses since then has always put me in mind of that desecrated place, which for me was a portent of things to come.
When I arrived in Saint-Malo, I found the Marquis de Causans and wandered through the streets of the camp under his guidance. The tents, the weapons stacks, and the horses tethered to their pickets formed a memorable scene, set against the backdrop of the sea and the ships, the high stone walls, and the distant steeples of town. It was in this camp, passing by me, in hussar’s garb, going full gallop on a Barbary steed, that I saw one of those men in whom a whole world came to an end: the Duc de Lauzun. The Prince de Carignan, who was also there in that camp, would later marry M. de Boisgarin’s daughter, a little crippled girl, but charming. This marriage caused a tremendous stir and led to a legal case in which M. Lacretelle the Elder is even now embroiled. But what connection do these things have with my life? “I have noticed, among some of my closest friends, that the more their memory provides them with the thing entire, the more they push their narrative so far back and load it with such pointless details that, if the tale is good, they smother its goodness, and if it isn’t good, you are left cursing either the felicity of their memory or the infelicity of their judgment. I have seen some very amusing stories become very boring in the mouth of a certain gentleman.”[5] I am afraid of being this gentleman.
My brother was also in Saint-Malo when M. de la Morandais deposited me there. One evening he said to me, “I’m going to take you to the theater. Go get your hat.”
I lost my head: I went straight down to the cellar looking for my hat, which was up in the attic. A troupe of traveling players had just arrived in town. I had seen puppet shows and supposed that one saw far lovelier marionettes in the theater than in the street.
I arrive, with my heart pounding, at a wooden building in a deserted street of town. I proceed through dark corridors, not without a certain sense of dread. A small door is opened, and there I am with my brother in a box half filled with people.
The curtain was raised and the performance began. The play was Diderot’s Le Père de famille. I saw two men walking around the stage and talking while everyone watched, and I took them for the puppetmasters, chatting outside Madame Gigogne’s hut while they waited for the audience to file in. I was only surprised at how loudly they were speaking of their affairs and how quietly everyone else was listening to them. My astonishment redoubled when I saw other characters arrive on stage, throwing up their arms and weeping, whereupon everyone around me also started weeping, as if there were some sort of contagion. The curtain fell without my having understood any of this. My brother went down to the lobby for intermission. Left alone in the box, among strangers whose very presence was a torment to my timidity, I wished that I were back in the obscurity of my school. Such was my first impression of the art of Sophocles and Molière.
The third year of my sojourn at Dol was marked by the weddings of my two eldest sisters: Marianne married the Comte de Marigny, and Benigne the Comte de Québriac. They went with their husbands to Fougères: the first intimation of the dispersal of my family, whose members were soon to be separated forever. My sisters received the nuptial blessing on the same day, at the same moment, at the same altar, in the chapel at Combourg. They were weeping; my mother was weeping; I was stunned by such sorrow. I understand it well today. I never attend a baptism or a wedding without a bitter smile or a pang of the heart. After the unhappiness of being born, I know of none greater than that of giving life to a man.
This same year saw a revolution in my person as well as in my family. Chance brought two very different books into my hands: an unexpurgated Horace and a compendium of Evil Confessions. The mental upheaval that these two books caused me is incredible. A strange new world came into being around me. On one side, I began to suspect that there were secrets incomprehensible to a boy my age, an existence different from mine, pleasures beyond my childish games, charms of an unknown nature in a sex that I knew only through my mother and my sisters; on the other, ghosts dragging chains and vomiting fire promised eternal punishments for a single hidden sin. I lost sleep over it; at night, I believed I could see black and white hands passing in turn across my curtains. I came to think that the white hands were cursed by religion, and this idea stoked my fear of the infernal shades. I searched hell and heaven in vain for an explanation of this double mystery. Stricken all at once in mind and body, I was still struggling with my innocence against the storms of premature passion and the terrors of superstition.
From then on I felt sparks flying from that fire which is the transmission of life. I construed the fourth book of the Aeneid and read Télémaque. Suddenly I discovered in Dido and Eucharis two beauties who ravished me; I became attuned to the harmony of those marvelous verses and that classical prose. One day I translated on sight Lucretius’s Aeneadum genetrix, hominum divumque voluptas, “Mother of Aeneas’s sons, voluptuous delight of men and gods,”[6] with such ardor that M. Égault tore the poem from my hands and set me to studying Greek roots. I palmed a copy of Tibullus, and when I reached Quam juvat immites ventos audire cubantem, “What joy to hear the wild winds as I lie here,”[7] the sensual pleasure and melancholy of these verses seemed to reveal to me my true nature. The volumes of Massillon that contained the sermons on Sinful Women and the Prodigal Son never left my side. I was allowed to leaf through any book I wanted, for no one suspected what I found in them. I would steal small candle-ends from the chapel and stay up all night reading seductive descriptions of the troubles of the soul. I would go to sleep babbling incoherent phrases in which I tried to put the sweetness, the meter, and the grace of the writer who had best conveyed the euphony of Racine’s verse into prose.
If I have since depicted, with some veracity, the workings of the human heart commingled with Christian synderesis,[8] I am convinced that I owe my successes to chance, which introduced me to those two inimical dominions at one and the same time. The havoc that a wicked book unleashed in my imagination was met with the corrective terrors that another book inspired, and these terrors were in turn allayed by the sweet thoughts stirred in me at seeing certain pictures unveiled.
*I experienced a palpable pleasure when, during the Restoration, I reencountered this gallant man, distinguished by his loyalty and Christian virtues. (Geneva, 1831)