Vallée-aux-Loups, end of December 1813
IN COMBOURG, I found a mission to nourish my piety. I followed its exercises, and, on the steps of the castle, kneeling beside the peasant boys and girls, I received the sacrament of Confirmation from the Bishop of Saint-Malo’s own hands. After this ceremony, we erected a stone crucifix. It still stands below the tower where my father died. For thirty years, it has seen no one moving in the windows of that tower. It is no longer saluted by the children of the castle. Every spring it waits for them in vain, but it sees only the return of the swallows, the companions of my youth, more loyal to their nest than man to his home. I might have been happy if my life had been spent at the foot of that mission cross—if only my hair had gone white beneath its mossy beams!
It was not long before I departed for Rennes, where I was to continue my studies and finish my instruction in mathematics, which would prepare me for the Naval Guard examination in Brest.
At the Collège de Rennes, a sort of Breton Juilly, there were three distinguished teachers: Abbé de Chateaugiron in the humanities, Abbé Germé in rhetoric, and Abbé Marchand in physics. The population at Rennes was large, made up of both boarders and day students, and the classes were very difficult. In living memory, Geoffroy and Ginguené had graduated from the school—men who would have done honor to Saint-Barbe or Plessis. The Chevalier de Parny also studied at Rennes. I inherited his bed in the room that was assigned to me.
Rennes seemed a Babylon to me, and the school a world. The multitude of teachers and students, the extent of the buildings, gardens, and courtyards, at first appeared boundless, although soon enough I was accustomed to it. On the principal’s birthday, we were given time off. We sang superb couplets at the top of our lungs:
I gained the same ascendancy over my new schoolmates that I had previously exercised over my comrades at Dol. It cost me a few punches. We Breton baboons are surly types. On half days, in the garden of the Benedictine abbey which we called “the Thabor,” we exchanged written challenges. We fastened mathematical compasses to the ends of sticks or battled hand to hand, more or less treacherously or courteously, according to the seriousness of the opponent’s challenge. There were judges appointed to decide who should throw the gage and what weapons the warriors could employ. And the fighting did not cease until one of the two parties declared himself vanquished. Here, I found my old friend Gesril, presiding over these engagements as he had in Saint-Malo. He volunteered to be my second in a spat I had with Saint-Riveul, the young gentleman who became the first victim of the Revolution. When I fell beneath my adversary, I refused to admit defeat and paid dearly for my arrogance. I said, like Jean Desmarest on his way to the scaffold, “I cry for mercy to no one but God.”
I met two men at this school who have since become famous for quite different reasons: Moreau, the general, and Limoëlan, the inventor of the infernal machine, who is today a priest in America.[14] Only one portrait of my Lucile exists, and this miserable miniature was executed by the very same Limoëlan, who turned portrait painter during the Revolutionary distress. Moreau was a day student, Limoëlan a boarder. It is rare to find at the same time, in the same province, in the same provincial city, under the roof of the same educational establishment, two destinies as singular as theirs.
Here I cannot help recounting a trick that my comrade Limoëlan once played on one of the prefects.
The prefect would usually make his rounds in the hallways after lights out, checking to see that all was well. For this purpose, he would look through the peepholes of every door. Limoëlan, Gesril, Saint-Riveul, and I slept in the same room:
More mischievous creatures, you have never met.[15]
On several previous occasions we had stopped up the peephole with paper to no avail. The prefect had simply poked the paper through and caught us jumping on our beds and breaking chairs. Then, one evening, without telling us of his plan, Limoëlan persuaded us all to get in bed and put out the light. A quarter of an hour later, we heard the prefect sneaking down the hall on tiptoe. As we were, reasonably enough, suspect in his eyes, he paused at our door, listened, went to look, and seeing no light at all. . . .
“Who has done this?” he shouted, bursting into our room.
Limoëlan choked with laughter and Gesril, in a nasal voice, asked in his half-naive, half-mocking way, “What’s wrong, Monsieur Prefect?” As for Saint-Riveul and me, we laughed just as hard as Limoëlan and hid ourselves beneath the covers.
They could get nothing out of us: we were heroic. We were all four imprisoned in the caves. Saint-Riveul dug out the earth beneath the door that opened on the farmyard: he stuck his head up through the molehill he had made and a pig ran toward him, making as if to eat his brains. Gesril broke into the school’s cellars and set a barrel of wine flowing. Limoëlan demolished a wall. For my part, like a second Perrin Dandin, I climbed to the basement window and stirred up the rabble in the street with my harangues. The terrible author of the infernal machine, playing this schoolboy prank on a school prefect, calls to mind the story of the young Cromwell flicking ink in the face of his fellow regicide, who was waiting to sign Charles I’s death warrant after him.
Although the education at the Collège de Rennes was very religious, my fervor was already subsiding. The large number of teachers and students multiplied the opportunities for distraction. I made progress in the study of languages and became strong in mathematics, for which I have always had a decided knack: I would have made a fine naval officer or engineer. All in all, I was born with a natural aptitude for almost everything. Attuned to amusing things as well as serious ones, I began with poetry before coming to prose; every one of the arts enraptured me, and I have loved music and architecture with a passion. Although quick to become bored by everything, I am always patient with the smallest details: I am endowed with the fortitude to face every impediment and, even when I grow weary of my object, my persistence is always greater than my boredom. I have never abandoned any project worth the trouble of completing. There are many things in my life that I have pursued for fifteen or twenty years with as much ardor on the last day as the first.
My supple intelligence has extended itself to secondary matters also. I was deft at chess, skilled at billiards, hunting, and fencing, and I was a passable draughtsman. I would have sung well, too, if my voice had been trained. All this, combined with my unusual education and my experience as a soldier and a traveler, explains why I have never been a pedant, nor ever displayed the dull conceit, awkwardness, and slovenliness of the literary men of the last century, nor the arrogant self-assurance, the vain and envious braggadocio, of the new authors.
I left the Collège de Rennes after two years. Gesril preceded me by eighteen months and went to join the Navy. My third sister, Julie, was married sometime in the course of these years. She wedded the Comte de Farcy, a captain in the Condé regiment, and later settled with her husband in Fougères, where my two oldest sisters were already living. Julie’s wedding, too, took place in the chapel at Combourg. It was there that I saw the Comtesse de Tronjoli who later distinguished herself by her courage on the scaffold: a cousin and close friend of the Marquis de La Rouërie, she would be implicated in his conspiracy. Until that day, I had not seen beauty outside of my own family, and I was flustered to discover it in a stranger’s face. Each stage of my life has opened a new vista to my eyes. I was then beginning to hear the distant, seductive voice of the passions calling to me, and I rushed to meet those sirens, drawn by their unfamiliar harmonies. It turned out that, like the high priest of Eleusis, I had a different incense for each deity. But could the hymns I sang while the incense burned be called “balms,”[16] as were the verses of the hierophant?