Paris, June 1821
EVERYTHING that you have read so far in this fourth book was written in Berlin. I have since returned to Paris for the Duc de Bordeaux’s baptism, and I have resigned my embassy out of political loyalty to M. de Villèle, who has left the ministry. Now that I’ve surrendered myself to leisure, let me write. As these Memoirs fill up with my bygone years, they put me more and more in mind of the lower bulb of an hourglass which shows me just how much dust has dropped out of my life: when all the sand has sifted down, I would not flip my glass timepiece over again, even if God granted me the power to do so.
The new solitude into which I entered in Brittany after my presentation was not like the solitude at Combourg: it was neither so absolute, nor so grave, nor, to tell the truth, so obligatory. It was permissible for me to leave it, and so it lost its value. An ancient Lady engraved on a shield and an old Baron emblazoned on a panel, keeping watch over the last of their daughters and the last of their sons in a feudal house, offered up what the English call “characters”: there was nothing provincial or constricting about this life, because it was not the life led by the rest of the world.
Where my sisters lived, the whole province seemed to come together in the fields. Neighbors danced at neighbors’ houses and put on plays in which I was sometimes an inept actor. In wintertime, one had to endure the small town society of Fougères: the balls, the assemblies, and the dinners where I could not, as in Paris, be forgotten.
Then again, I had not seen the Army and the Court without undergoing a change of ideas. Despite my natural tastes, something in me was rebelling against obscurity and imploring me to emerge from the shadows; Julie held provincial life in horror; the instincts of genius and beauty were pushing Lucile toward a wider stage. I therefore began to feel uneasy about my existence in Brittany. Something told me that this existence was not my destiny.
Yet I loved the country, and the country near Marigny was delightful.* My regiment had changed its quarters: the first battalion was garrisoned in Le Havre, the second in Dieppe. I rejoined the latter and discovered that my presentation had made a celebrity of me. I began to develop a taste for my profession. I worked hard at my drills, and I was put in charge of recruits, whom I marched up and down the pebbles by the sea. That sea has formed the background of almost every scene of my life.
La Martinière did not concern himself in Dieppe with his namesake, Lamartinière, nor with the Father Simon, who wrote against Bossuet, Port-Royal, and the Benedictines, nor with the anatomist Pecquet, whom Madame de Sévigné called “le petit Pecquet”; but La Martinière was in love in Dieppe, as he had been in Cambrai. He wilted at the feet of a formidable Norman whose headdress and coiffure were near half a fathom high. She was not a young woman. By a singular coincidence, she was named Cauchie, a granddaughter of that Anne Cauchie of Dieppe who, in 1645, was one hundred and fifty years old.[10]
It was in 1647 that Anne of Austria, looking at the sea, as I did, through the windows of her room, passed the time by watching the fire-ships burn for her amusement. She let the people who had been loyal to Henri IV keep watch over the young Louis XIV, and she showered these people with infinite benedictions, “in spite of their vile Norman tongue.”[11]
Some of the feudal royalties that I had seen paid in Combourg still prevailed in Dieppe: to a householder named Vauquelin there were due three pigs’ heads, each with an orange between its teeth, and three sous of the oldest known coinage.
I went back to spend a six-month leave in Fougères. The place was now presided over by a noble old maid named Mademoiselle de La Belinaye, the aunt of that Comtesse de Tronjoli whom I have already mentioned. An agreeably ugly young woman, the sister of an officer in the Condé Regiment, attracted my attention. I would not have had the temerity to raise my eyes to beauty; it was only in the presence of a woman’s imperfections that I dared risk a respectful homage.
Madame de Farcy, still suffering, had finally resolved to decamp from Brittany. She decided that Lucile should go with her, and Lucile, in her turn, conquered my repugnance. Together we took the road to Paris, in a sweet partnership of the three youngest birds of the nest.
My brother was married by then, and residing with his father-in-law, the President de Rosambo, in the rue de Bondy. We decided to settle in the same neighborhood. Through the good offices of M. Delisle de Sales, who lived in the Saint-Lazare pavilions, we secured an apartment in these same pavilions, at the top of the Faubourg Saint-Denis.
*Marigny has changed significantly since the days when my sister lived there. It was sold and today belongs to the Pommereuls, who have had the house rebuilt and completely renovated.