THE TIME of my first communion was drawing near, the moment when it was customary for a family to decide a child’s future station. This religious ceremony among young Christians took the place of the taking of the toga virilis practiced among the Romans. Madame de Chateaubriand came from Combourg to attend the first communion of a son who, after being united with God, would be separated from his mother.
My piety in those days appeared sincere. I edified the whole school, my eyes were ardent, and my fasts were so frequent as to make even my teachers uneasy. They feared the excess of my devotion and sought to temper my fervor with their enlightened faith.
I had for my confessor the superior of the Eudist seminary, a man of fifty with a very austere look about him. Every time I took my seat in the confessional booth, he would question me anxiously. Surprised at the slightness of my sins, he did not know how to reconcile my agitation with the small importance of the secrets I confided to him. The closer Easter came, the more pressing the priest’s questions became.
“Aren’t you keeping something from me?” he would ask.
“No, Father.”
“Have you not committed such and such a sin?” he would say.
And it was always “No, Father.”
He would dismiss me doubtfully, sighing and trying to peer into the depths of my soul, while I, on my side, would leave his presence as pale and disfigured as a criminal.
I was to receive absolution on Holy Wednesday. I spent the night from Tuesday into Wednesday praying, and also reading, with a feeling of terror, the book of Evil Confessions. On Wednesday, at three in the afternoon, we set off for the seminary in the company of our parents. All the vain commotion that has since surrounded my name would not have given Madame de Chateaubriand an ounce of the pride she experienced, as a Christian and as a mother, when she saw her son prepared to participate in the great mystery of religion.
On entering the church, I prostrated myself before the altar and lay there as if annihilated. When I stood to go to the sacristy, where the superior was waiting, my knees trembled beneath me. I threw myself at the priest’s feet, and only in the most strangled voice was I able to pronounce my Confiteor.
“Well,” asked the man of God, “have you forgotten anything?”
I held my tongue. The priest’s questions began again, and again the fatal “no, Father” escaped my lips. He fell into meditation and asked for the counsel of He who had conferred on the Apostles the power of binding and loosing souls. Then, making an effort, he prepared to grant me absolution.
If lightning had struck me from on high, it would have caused me less fear.
I cried out, “I have not told it all!”
And this formidable judge, this delegate of the sovereign Arbiter, whose stern face inspired such fear in me, became the tenderest of shepherds. He embraced me and burst into tears. “Come now, dear boy,” he said, “have courage!”
I had never known such a moment in my life. If the weight of a mountain had been lifted from me, I could not have been more relieved: I sobbed with happiness. I would venture to say that it was on this day that I became an honest man. I felt that I could never survive the pain of remorse. How much more painful it must be for a criminal, if I could suffer so much over my childish flaws? But how divine it is that religion can take hold of what is good in us! What moral precepts can ever take the place of these Christian institutions?
After this first confession, the rest cost me nothing. The childish things that I had concealed, which would have made the world smile, were weighed on the scales of religion. The superior was very embarrassed. He would have liked to delay my communion, but I was about to leave the Collège de Dol, and very soon after I would join the navy. He wisely perceived, in the character of my juvenile sins, insignificant as they were, the nature of my proclivities. He was the first man to discern the secret of what I might one day become. He divined my future passions and did not conceal the good he thought he saw in me, but he also predicted some of the evils. “After all,” he said, “you have little time for penance. But you have been cleansed of your sins by your courageous, if tardy, confession.” Then, raising his hand, he pronounced the formula of absolution. And now, this second time, his disquieting arm descended on my head like the rosy dew of heaven. I bowed my head to receive his blessing, and I partook of the joy of the angels. I ran to press myself to my mother’s bosom: she was waiting for me at the foot of the altar. I no longer looked the same to my teachers and my schoolmates. I walked with a light step, my head held high, my face radiant, in all the triumph of repentance.
The next day, Maundy Thursday, I was admitted to that sublime and moving ceremony which I tried to depict in The Genius of Christianity. I might have felt my habitual humiliations there, too: my bouquet and my clothes were not as fine as those of my companions. But that day everything was from God and for God. I know exactly what true faith is: the Real Presence of the Victim in the Blessed Sacrament was as manifest to me that day as my mother’s presence at my side. When the Host was laid on my tongue, I felt as though everything were afire inside me. I trembled with respect for it, and the only material thing that intruded on my brain was the fear of profaning the sacramental bread:
Le pain que je vous propose
Sert aux anges d’aliment,
Dieu lui-même le compose
De la fleur de son froment.
(Racine)[11]
I understood then the courage of the martyrs. At that moment, I could have borne witness to Christ on the rack or in the face of a lion.
I love to recall these ecstasies. They made their mark on my soul only a few moments before I underwent the tribulations of the wider world. Compare these ardors with the transports I will soon depict; see the same heart experience in the space of three or four years all that is sweet and worthy in the ways of innocence and religion, and all that is seductive and funereal in the ways of passion; choose between these two joys, and you may see on which side you should search for happiness and, above all, peace.
Three weeks after my first communion, I left the Collège de Dol. I still retain a pleasant memory of the place. Our childhood leaves something of itself in the places it has embellished, as a flower lends its fragrance to the objects it has touched. To this day, I find myself thinking back on the disbandment of my first schoolmates and my first teachers: Abbé Leprince, who was appointed to a benefice near Rouen, did not live much longer; Abbé Égault found a rectorship in the diocese of Rennes; and I myself saw the good principal, Abbé Portier, die in the first days of the Revolution. He was a bookish man, gentle and simple-hearted. I will always honor and cherish the memory of that obscure Rollin.[12]