TWO MONTHS rolled by: I found myself alone on my native island. La Villeneuve had only recently died there. Going to mourn beside the poor empty bed where she had passed away, I saw the little wicker cart in which I had first learned to stand upright on this sad globe, and I pictured my old nurse, confined to her bed, turning her weakened gaze on this wheeled basket. This first memento of my existence set beside the last memento of the existence of my second mother made me see that the good Villeneuve must have prayed for the happiness of her foster child even on her deathbed. The thought of her fondness for me, so constant, so disinterested, so pure, broke my heart with tenderness, regrets, and gratitude.
Otherwise, nothing of my past remained in Saint-Malo. In the harbor I looked in vain for the ships in whose rigging I had played: they had departed or been dismantled. In the village, the building where I was born had been transformed into an inn. I was hardly out of my cradle, and already a whole world had vanished; I had become a stranger in my childhood haunts, and everyone I met asked me who I was for no reason except that my head had risen a few inches above the ground toward which, in a year or two, it will bow again. How quickly and how often we change our lives and our illusions! Some friends leave us, and others take their place; our relationships alter: there is always a time when we possessed nothing of what we now possess, a time when we have nothing of what we used to have. Man has not one and the same life; he has several lives laid end to end, and that is the cause of his misery.
Friendless now, I explored the strand that had once seen me building sandcastles: campos ubi Troja fuit.[11] I walked along a beach forsaken by the sea. The sands, abandoned by the tides, seemed to me an emblem of those desolated spaces that illusions leave around us when they fade. My fellow countryman Abelard once gazed at the waves as I did, eight hundred years ago, remembering Héloïse. Like me, he watched the ships departing (ad horizontis undas), and his ears, like mine, were lulled by the droning surf.[12] I waded through the breakers and gave myself over to those lethal fantasies that I had brought with me from the woods of Combourg. Only Cape Lavarde put an end to my wanderings. Seated on the point of this headland, lost in the bitterest thoughts, I recalled that these same rocks had served as my hiding place on festival days. Here, I had swallowed my tears while my friends grew drunk with joy. I did not feel any more loved nor any happier than I did then. Soon I would leave my native land and fritter away my days in foreign climes. These reflections grieved me half to death, and I was tempted to let myself fall into the breakers.
A letter summoned me back to Combourg. I arrived and sat down to supper with my family. My father said not a word; my mother sighed. Lucile seemed dismayed. At ten o’clock we went to bed. I questioned my sister, but she knew nothing. The next morning at eight o’clock a servant came to fetch me. I went downstairs. My father was waiting for me in his study.
“Monsieur le Chevalier,” he said to me, “you must renounce your follies. Your brother has obtained a sublieutenant’s commission for you in the Navarre Regiment. You shall go to Rennes and from there to Cambrai. Here are a hundred louis d’or. Do not squander them. I am old and sick. I am not long for this world. Conduct yourself as a good man should, and never dishonor your name.”
He kissed me, and I felt that rough, stern face pressed tenderly against mine: it was to be my last paternal embrace.
At that moment, the Comte de Combourg, a man who had always been so formidable in my eyes, appeared to me simply as a father most worthy of my affection. I grabbed his gaunt hand and wept. He was already suffering then from the paralysis that would lead him to the grave. His left arm had a convulsive tremor, which he was obliged to keep still with his right hand. It was holding his arm in this way, and after presenting me with his old sword, that, without giving me time to recover myself, he led me to the cabriolet waiting for me in the Green Court. He made me board it in his presence. The postilion drove off even as I bade farewell to my mother and my sister, who were dissolving in tears on the steps.
We drove up the lane by the pond. I looked at the reeds where my swallows perched, the millstream, and the meadow. I cast my gaze back toward the castle. And then, like Adam after his sin, I went forth into an unknown country: and the world was all before him.[13]
Since that day, I have seen Combourg three times. After my father’s death, the family met there in mourning, to divide our inheritance and say our goodbyes. Another time I accompanied my mother to Combourg, when she was busy furnishing the castle for my brother, who was to bring my sister-in-law to live in Brittany. My brother never arrived. Beside his young wife, at the executioner’s hands, he was to receive a very different place to lay his head than the pillow my mother prepared for him. Finally, I passed through Combourg a third time, on my way to Saint-Malo, before I embarked for America. The castle was abandoned, and I had to spend the night in the steward’s house. When, wandering on the Grand Mall, I looked down a dark alley of trees and saw the empty staircase and the closed windows and doors, I felt faint. I dragged myself back to the village and sent for my horses. I left in the middle of the night.
After fifteen years away, before leaving France once more and traveling to the Holy Land, I raced to Fougères to embrace what remained of my family. But I did not have the heart to make a pilgrimage to those fields where the most vivid part of my life took place. It was in the woods of Combourg that I became what I am, that I began to feel the first onslaught of that ennui which I have dragged with me through all my days, and that sadness which has been both my torment and my bliss. There, I searched for a heart in sympathy with mine; there, I saw my family join together and disband; there, my father dreamed of seeing his name reestablished and the fortune of his house renewed: yet another chimera that time and the Revolution dispelled. Of the six children that we were, only three are left. My brother, Julie, and Lucile are no more; my mother is dead of grief; my father’s ashes were filched from his tomb.
If my work survives me and my name endures, maybe one day, guided by these Memoirs, some traveler will visit the places I have described. He may still recognize the castle, but he would look in vain for the great woods: the cradle of my dreams has vanished, like the dreams themselves. Left alone on its rock, my old keep mourns the oaks, its ancient companions, who surrounded it and shielded it from storms. Isolated as that keep, I too have seen them falling around me, the family that once eased my days and gave me shelter. Happily, my life is not built on the earth as solidly as the towers where I passed my youth, and man offers less resistance to the storms than the monuments raised by his hands.