Dieppe, Vallée-aux-Loups, December 1813
FROM DIEPPE, where the police injunction had forced me to take refuge, I have been permitted to return to the Vallée-aux-Loups, where I am now picking up the thread of my narrative again. The earth trembles under the footsteps of foreign soldiers who are at this very moment invading my native land. I write this, like the last Romans, amid the tumult of Barbarian invasion. By day, I scribble pages as agitated as the events of the moment;* by night, when the rumble of distant gunfire fades from my woods, I return in silence to those years that sleep in the grave, to the peace of my earliest memories. How narrow and short is one man’s past beside the vast present of the nations and the immensity of their future!
•
Mathematics, Greek, and Latin occupied the whole of my winter at school. What time was not dedicated to study was given over to those childhood games that are the same in all places. The little Englishman, the little German, the little Italian, the little Spaniard, the little Iroquois, the little Bedouin—all of them roll hoops and throw the ball. Children are brothers of one great family and lose their common features only when they lose their innocence. It’s the same the world over. The passions, modified by climates, governments, and customs, form the different nations; humankind ceases to speak and understand the same language: it is society that is the true Tower of Babel.
One morning, I was engrossed in a game of prisoner’s base in the schoolyard when I was told that I was wanted. I followed the servant to the main gate. I found a large, red-faced man with a brusque and impatient way about him, a ferocious tone of voice, carrying a stick in his hand and wearing a badly curled black wig, a torn cassock that he had tucked into his pockets, dusty shoes, and stockings with gaping holes at the heels.
“You,” he said. “Little wretch. Are you not the Chevalier de Chateaubriand de Combourg?”
“Yes, Monsieur,” I replied, stunned by the way he spoke to me.
“And I,” he said, almost foaming at the mouth, “I am the last of the oldest branch of your family. I am the Abbé de Chateaubriand de la Guérande. Take a good look at me now.”
The proud priest put his hand in the fob pocket of his old plush breeches, pulled out a moldy six-franc coin wrapped in greasy paper, flung the thing at my nose, and continued his journey afoot, muttering his matins with a furious air. I have since learned that the Prince de Condé once offered this country cleric the post of tutor to the Duc de Bourbon. The bumptious priest replied that the prince, as the owner of the Chateaubriand barony, ought to know that the heirs to this barony might have tutors, but that they would be tutors to no man. Such hauteur was the chief failing of my family. In my father it was odious; my brother took it to ridiculous lengths, and it has passed down to some degree to his eldest son. I am not quite sure, despite my Republican leanings, whether I have entirely shaken it off myself, much as I have tried to conceal it.
* De Bonaparte et des Bourbons (Geneva, 1831)