Montboissier, August 1817
THESE tales always occupied my mother and sister at bedtime. They climbed under the covers scared to death; I retired to the top of my turret; the cook returned to his tower; and the servants went down to their subterranean abode.
The window of my keep opened onto the interior courtyard. During the day, I had a view of the crenellations on the curtain-wall opposite, where hart’s-tongue fern and a wild plum tree grew. A few martins, which dove shrieking into the holes in the walls all summer long, were my sole companions. At night, I could see only a thin patch of sky and a few stars. When the moon shone and sank in the west, I was apprised of it by the rays that fell through the diamond-shaped windowpanes on my bed. Owls, flying from one tower to the other, passed back and forth between the moon and me, and cast the mobile shadows of their wings on my curtains. Relegated to the most deserted part of the castle, at the opening of the galleries, I did not miss a murmur in the dark. Sometimes, the wind would seem to scamper lightly; sometimes, it would let out groans. All of a sudden my door would be violently shaken, the underground rooms of the castle would start howling; then the noises would die away, only to start up again. At four in the morning, the master’s voice calling his footman at the entrance to the ancient vaults echoed like the voice of the night’s last phantom. For me, this voice took the place of the sweet music with which Montaigne’s father used to wake his son.[4]
The Comte de Chateaubriand’s stubborn insistence on making a child go to bed alone at the top of a tower may have had some drawbacks, but it turned out to my advantage. My father’s violent way of treating me left me with a man’s courage, and without robbing me of that imaginative sensitivity of which they now try to deprive the young. Instead of attempting to persuade me that ghosts did not exist, my mother and father forced me to confront them. When my father said to me, with an ironic smile, “Would Monsieur le Chevalier be afraid?” he could have made me sleep with a corpse. When my good mother said to me, “My child, nothing happens except by God’s permission: you have nothing to fear from evil spirits so long as you are a good Christian,” I was more reassured than by all the arguments of philosophy. My victory was so complete that the night winds which came to my disinhabited turret were soon the playthings of my invention and the wings of my dreams. My enflamed imagination spread to everything around it, but nowhere did it find enough to keep it fed: had it been able, it would have devoured heaven and earth. This is the moral state that I must now describe. Delving again into the days of my youth, I am going to try to grapple with my past self, to show myself such as I was, such as I perhaps regret I no longer am, despite the torments I endured.