Montboissier, July 1817; Revised in December 1846
AT THE time of my return from Brest, four masters (my father, my mother, my sister, and I) inhabited the Château de Combourg. A cook, a chambermaid, two footmen, and a coachman comprised the entire domestic staff. A hunting dog and two old mares were confined in a corner of the stable. These twelve living beings easily vanished in a castle where a hundred knights, their ladies, their squires, and their pages, together with King Dagobert’s warhorses and his pack of hounds, could almost have gone unnoticed.
In the whole course of the year, not a single stranger showed his face in the castle save for a pair of noblemen, the Marquis de Montlouet and the Comte de Goyon-Beaufort, who sought hospitality on their way to plead at Parliament. They came in winter, on horseback, pistols on their saddlebows and hunting knives at their sides, accompanied by a footman, also on horseback, who rode with a big livery portmanteau behind him.
My father, always a very formal man, greeted them bareheaded out on the steps amid the wind and the rain. Once inside, these country gentlemen endlessly recounted their war days in Hanover, the affairs of their families, and the history of their lawsuits. At night, they were shown up to the north tower, to Queen Christina’s Chamber, a guest room furnished with a bed seven feet square, supported by four gold-leaf Cupids, and surrounded by a double set of curtains made of green gauze and crimson silk. The next morning, when I went down to the great hall and looked through the windows at the country flooded and covered over with frost, I saw only two or three travelers on the lonely lane by the pond. These were our guests, riding toward Rennes.
These strangers did not know much about the things of life; yet our view was extended a few leagues beyond the horizon of our woods by their visits. As soon as they had left, we were reduced, on weekdays, to our small family circle, and on Sundays to the company of the village bourgeoisie and the local gentry.
On Sundays when the weather was fine, my mother, Lucile, and I crossed the Little Mall and walked along a country road to the parish church. When it rained, we took the abominable rue de Combourg. We did not, like the Abbé de Marolles, travel in a light chariot drawn by four white horses captured from the Turks in Hungary.[2] My father, for his part, went down to the parish only once a year, to perform his Easter duties. The rest of the time, he heard Mass in the chapel of his own castle. Sitting in the lord’s pew, he received incense and prayers across from the black marble tomb of Renée de Rohan, next to the altar. What an emblem of the honors of man!—a few plumes of smoke before a coffin.
These Sunday entertainments were over with the day. They were not even the usual fare. During the worst season, months would go by without a single human creature knocking at the door to our fortress. If the gloom was great on the moors around Combourg, it was still greater inside the castle. One experienced the same sensation, strolling beneath its vaults, as in the Carthusian monastery of Grenoble. When I visited that place in 1805, I had to roam across a mute wilderness that was perpetually growing around me. I thought it would end at the monastery, but within the very walls of the cloister the monks showed me the charterhouse gardens, which were even more forsaken than the woods. At last, in the center of the monument, I found an old graveyard swathed in folds of solitude: a sanctuary where endless silence, the presiding spirit of the place, extended its empire over the mountains and the forests for miles around.
The mournful calm of the Château de Combourg was intensified by my father’s taciturn, unsociable temperament. Instead of drawing his family and his servants in around him, he had scattered them to every corner of the castle. His bedroom was in the small eastern tower, and his study was in the small western tower. The furniture of this study consisted of three black leather chairs and a table strewn with deeds and scrolls. A genealogical tree of the Chateaubriand family hung over the mantel, and in the embrasure of a window he had displayed all sorts of armaments, from a small pistol to a blunderbuss. My mother’s apartment was above the great hall, between the two small towers: it was parqueted and decorated with faceted Venetian mirrors. My sister lived in a smaller room adjoining my mother’s. The chambermaid slept a great distance away, in the main building between the two large towers. As for me, I made my nest in a sort of isolated cell in a turret, at the top of the staircase that led from the interior courtyard to the various wings of the castle. At the bottom of this staircase, my father’s footman and another manservant lay down to sleep in the vaulted cellar. The cook had his garrison in the fat western tower.
My father arose every morning at four o’clock, in winter and summer alike. He went into the interior courtyard and called for his footman to wake. He was brought a small cup of coffee at five o’clock, and then worked in his study till noon. My mother and my sister each breakfasted in her own room at eight o’clock. I had no fixed time for either rising or for breakfasting: I was reputed to be studying until noon, but most of the time I did nothing.
At half past eleven, the bell rang for dinner, which was served at midday. The great hall served us as both dining room and sitting room: we dined in one corner on the east side, and, after the meal was over, we went and sat in the opposite corner on the west side, in front of an enormous fireplace. This hall was wainscoted, painted a whitish gray, and decorated with old portraits dating from the reign of François I to that of Louis XIV. Among these portraits, one could recognize the faces of Condé and Turenne. A painting, depicting Hector slain by Achilles beneath the walls of Troy, hung above the fireplace.
When dinner was finished, we sat together until two o’clock. Then, if it were summer, my father amused himself by fishing, or visiting his kitchen garden, or taking a walk no longer than a capon’s flight. If it were autumn or winter, he went hunting. My mother meanwhile withdrew to the chapel, where she spent several hours in prayer. This chapel was a dim oratorium, prettified by good pictures by some very great painters, such as one would hardly expect to find in a feudal castle in the depths of Brittany. I have in my possession today a Holy Family by Albani, painted on copper, taken from this chapel: it is all that remains to me of Combourg.
My father gone and my mother at her prayers, Lucile shut herself up in her room, and I either trudged back up to my cell or went to wander in the fields.
At eight o’clock, the bell rang for supper. After supper, on fine days, we sat out on the steps. My father, armed with his gun, shot at the owls that flew from the battlements at twilight. My mother, Lucile, and I gazed at the sky, the woods, the last rays of sun, and the first stars. At ten o’clock, we would climb the stairs and go to bed.
Autumn and winter evenings were of a different nature. When supper was over and the four diners had moved from the table to the fireside, my mother sank with a sigh into an old daybed upholstered in imitation Siam; she was brought a pedestal table and a candle. I huddled by the fireside with Lucile, while the servants cleared the table and retired for the night. It was then that my father began a stroll that did not cease until he went to bed. He was dressed in a thick white woolen gown, or rather a sort of cloak, which I have never seen on anybody but him, and he covered his half-bald head with a tall white cap that stood straight up. When, in the course of this stroll, he moved away from the hearth, the vast hall was so dimly lit, by a single candle, that he was no longer visible. Only his footsteps could still be heard in the darkness. Then, slowly, he would return toward the light, emerging little by little from the shadows, like a specter, with his white gown, his white cap, and his long pale face. Lucile and I exchanged a few whispered words while he was at the far end of the hall, but we fell silent as soon as he came near. He asked, as he passed us, “What are you two chattering about?” Terror-stricken, we made no reply. Our father continued on his walk. For the rest of the evening, nothing could be heard but the measured sound of his footsteps, my mother’s sighs, and the murmuration of the wind.[3]
When ten hours sounded on the castle clock, my father stopped. The same spring that had raised the hammer of the clockworks seemed to have suspended his steps. He pulled out his watch, wound it, took a large silver candlestick topped with a tall candle, went for a moment into the small western tower, then returned, torch in hand, and made his way toward his bedroom in the small eastern tower. Lucile and I would place ourselves in his path. We kissed him and wished him goodnight. He bent down to offer us his dry, hollow cheek without a word, and proceeded on his way, disappearing into the depths of the tower, whose doors we heard closing behind him.
And the spell was broken. My mother, my sister, and I, transformed into statues by my father’s presence, began to recover the functions of life. The first result of our disenchantment was an overflow of words. If silence had oppressed us, it now paid us back in full.
Once this torrent of words had run its course, I called for the chambermaid and escorted my mother and sister to their rooms. Before I left them, they made me look under the beds, up the chimneys, behind the doors, and in the neighboring staircases, passageways, and corridors. All the old traditions of the castle, the tales of robbers and ghosts, came to trouble their thoughts. The servants were convinced that a certain peg-legged Comte de Combourg, who had been dead for three centuries, appeared from time to time, and that one was especially likely to encounter him on the staircase in the turret. His wooden leg also sometimes walked alone, with a black cat by its side.