Dieppe, End of October 1812
WHAT THEY say of troubles, that they never come alone, might also be said of the passions. They arrive together, like the Muses or the Furies. Together with the weakness that had begun to agonize me, my sense of honor was born. Honor is an exaltation of the soul that keeps the heart incorruptible in a world of corruption—a kind of restorative principle set beside the principle of depletion, like the inexhaustible spring of wonders that love asks of youth set beside the sacrifices that love imposes.
When the weather was fine, boarders were permitted to spend Thursdays and Sundays away from school. Often, we were taken to Mont-Dol, on the summit of which there were some Gallo-Roman ruins. Looking down from the heights of this isolated hillock, the eye soared over the sea and the marshes where will-o’-the-wisps flew by night, casting those magic lights that nowadays burn in our lamps. Other days, the object of our strolls was the meadowland surrounding a seminary of Eudists, named after Eudes, the brother of the historian Mézerai, who had founded their congregation.
One day in the month of May, Abbé Égault, who was prefect that week, had led us to this seminary. We were at liberty to play almost anywhere, but he expressly forbade us from climbing the trees. Then, having set us loose on a grassy path, he went off to recite his breviary.
A few tall elms bordered the path. At the very top of the tallest one, a magpie’s nest seemed to glow. We looked up in admiration, all pointing to the mother bird sitting on her eggs and all seized by a keen desire to possess that superb prey. But who would dare take the risk? The prohibition was so strict, the prefect so near, the tree so tall. All hopes rested on me: I climbed like a cat. I hesitated, but soon enough visions of glory prevailed. I shed my coat, put my arms around the elm, and started my ascent. The trunk had no branches until two-thirds of the way up, where it formed a fork, one of whose tines bore the nest.
My fellow boarders gathered beneath the tree and cheered my efforts, keeping one eye on me and one eye on the path by which the prefect might come at any moment, stamping with joy in expectation of the egg, and dying of fear in expectation of punishment. I reached the nest; the magpie flew away; I plundered the eggs, put them in my shirt, and began to climb down. Unfortunately, I let myself slip between the twin trunks and was stuck straddling the fork. The tree had been so neatly pruned that I couldn’t find the foothold I would have needed to lift myself up and grab hold of the main trunk again. So I remained, hanging in the air, fifty feet above the ground.
Suddenly there was a shout—“There he is! The prefect!”—and I found myself abandoned by my companions forthwith, as is the custom. One boy, named Le Gobbien, attempted to help me, but he was soon forced to give up this generous enterprise. There was but one way for me to escape my annoying predicament, and that was to dangle by my hands from one of the two branches of the fork while trying to grip the trunk with my feet somewhere below the bifurcation. I executed this maneuver at the risk of my life. Amid these tribulations, I did not let go of my treasure, although I would have been better off throwing it away, as I have since thrown away so many others. Sliding down the trunk, I skinned my hands, scraped my knees and my chest, and crushed the eggs. It was this that gave me away. The prefect had not even seen me up the tree, and I hid my blood from him easily enough; but there was no way to hide the bright yellow stuff smeared all over my clothes.
“Let’s go, Monsieur,” he said to me. “You shall have a flogging.” If this man had told me that he would commute his sentence to a death sentence, I would have felt a thrill of joy. The idea of shame had not yet entered into my savage education, and, at any age, there was no torture that I would not have preferred to the horror of having to blush before another living creature. Indignation rose in my throat. I replied to Abbé Égault, in the tone of a man, not a child, that neither he nor anyone else would ever lift his hand against me. This response riled him. He called me a rebel and promised to make an example of me.
“We shall see,” I said, and I set to playing ball with a sangfroid that perplexed him.
We returned to the school. The prefect made me go to his room and ordered me to submit to my punishment. My exalted feelings gave way to a flood of tears. I reminded Abbé Égault that he had taught me Latin, that I was his pupil, his disciple, his child, that he could not wish to dishonor his own student and make the sight of my friends unbearable to me, that he could lock me up in prison and feed me only bread and water, deprive me of my pleasures and load me with pensums, and that I would be grateful to him for his clemency and love him all the more. I fell at his knees. I clasped my hands and begged him to spare me in the name of Jesus Christ, but he remained deaf to my pleas. Then I rose to my feet, flushed with rage, and kicked his legs so violently that he let out a cry. He hurried to close the door of his room, double-locked it, and turned back to face me. I entrenched myself behind his bed. He lunged at me across the mattress with a ferule in his hand. I twisted myself up in his bed linens and, rousing myself to battle, shrieked:
“Macte animo, generose puer! ” [9]
This show of schoolboy erudition made my enemy laugh despite himself. He spoke of armistice, and we concluded a treaty: I agreed to yield to the principal’s judgment. The principal, without pardoning me altogether, decided that I should be excused from the punishment which had so repulsed me. When this excellent priest pronounced my acquittal, I kissed the sleeve of his robe with such a heartfelt outpouring of gratitude that the man could not help but give me his blessing. Thus ended the first battle in which I defended my honor, the idol of my life, for which I have so often sacrificed tranquility, pleasure, and fortune.
The fall holidays, during which I turned twelve, were sad days. Abbé Leprince accompanied me to Combourg, and I did not go out at all except in the company of my tutor. Together we went for long and aimless strolls. He was dying of consumption; he was melancholy and silent: I was hardly more cheerful. We would walk for hours at a time, one behind the other, without speaking a word. One day, we lost our way in the woods, and M. Leprince turned to me and said, “Which way should we go?”
I replied without hesitation, “The sun is setting. Around now the light glints off the high tower. We should walk in that direction.”
M. Leprince recounted this incident to my father that evening. There was already something of the future traveler in my swift decision. Many a time, seeing the sun set in the forests of America, I recalled the woods of Combourg. My memories echo one another.
Abbé Leprince suggested that I be given a horse, but according to my father’s ideas the only thing a naval officer needed to know how to handle was a ship. I was thus reduced to riding one of the two fat coach horses or a big piebald, and this only behind my father’s back. My piebald was not, like Turenne’s piebald, one of those war horses trained to aid their masters which the Romans called “desultorios equos”[10]: he was a lunatic Pegasus unmanageable at a trot who bit at my legs whenever I set him to jumping a ditch. I have never much cared for horses, although I have lived the life of a Tartar, and, despite my early training, I still ride with more elegance than balance.
A case of Tertian fever, the germ of which I had brought home with me from Dol, relieved me of M. Leprince. A quacksalver was passing through the village at the time. My father, who had no faith in doctors and great faith in charlatans, sent for this man, who declared that he could cure me in twenty-four hours. The next day he returned wearing a green coat trimmed with gold braid, a large powdered wig, huge ruffles of filthy muslin around his neck, false diamonds on his fingers, threadbare satin breeches, bluish-white stockings, and shoes with enormous buckles.
He threw open my bed-curtains, felt my pulse, made me stick out my tongue, jabbered a few words in an Italian accent—something about how I needed purging—and gave me a small piece of caramel to eat. My father approved of all this, for he maintained that every illness rose from indigestion. He believed that all maladies could be cured by purging your man to the blood.
Half an hour after swallowing the caramel, I was seized by a terrific fit of vomiting. As soon as M. de Chateaubriand was told of this, he wanted to throw the poor Italian devil out the tower window. The medicine man, obviously frightened, removed his coat and rolled up his shirtsleeves, making the most grotesque gesticulations imaginable. With each gesture, his wig turned in a new direction, and he replicated my cries with his own, saying, “Che? Monsou Lavandier?” This M. Lavandier was the village chemist, who had been called in to help. In the throes of my suffering, I did not know whether I would die from taking the charlatan’s drugs or from roaring with laughter at his absurdity.
The effects of this violent dose of emetic were halted, and I was soon on my feet again. All our life is spent wandering around our grave; all our illnesses are so many gusts of wind that bring us nearer or farther from port. The first dead man I saw was a clergyman in Saint-Malo. He lay lifeless on the bed, his face distorted by the last convulsions. Death is beautiful, she is our friend; only we do not realize it because she comes to us masked, and the mask she wears horrifies us.
I was sent back to school at the end of autumn.