Paris, October 1821
IT WAS at this time that my brother, still pursuing his plans, took it upon himself to have me admitted to the Order of Malta. This meant that I would have to join the clergy, a favor that could be granted me by M. Courtois de Pressigny, the Bishop of Saint-Malo. I therefore went back to my native town, where my excellent mother had retired. She no longer had her children around her. She passed her days in church and her evenings in knitting. Her absent-mindedness was incredible: I saw her one morning in the street carrying one of her slippers under her arm instead of her prayer book. From time to time, a few old friends would come to visit her in her retreat and talk about the good old days. When she and I were alone, she would make up lovely stories in verse, which she improvised. In one of these stories the devil carried off a chimney (a heretic had been trapped inside it) and the poet cried out:
All along the avenue
The devil went so fast
That he was lost to view
Before an hour had passed.
“It seems to me,” I said, “that the devil does not walk so fast after all.”
But Madame de Chateaubriand proved to me that I didn’t know what I was talking about: she was charming, my mother.
She knew by heart a long ballad about the True Story of a Wild Duck in the Town of Montfort-la-Cane-lez-Saint-Malo. A certain lord had imprisoned a young girl, a great beauty, in the Château de Montfort, and was planning to ravish her. At that moment, through a window, she saw the Church of Saint-Nicolas. She prayed to the saint with her eyes full of tears and was miraculously transported outside the castle walls. But she fell into the hands of some of the villain’s servants, who wanted to use her as they supposed their master had already done. The poor girl was distraught. She looked around her in every direction for help but saw nothing except a few wild ducks on a pond. Renewing her prayers to Saint Nicolas, she besought him to make these animals witnesses to her innocence, so that, if she lost her life and could not discharge the vows she had made to the saint, the birds would fulfill these vows in their own fashion, in her name and on her behalf.
The girl died within the year: and behold, on the Feast of the Translation of the Bones of Saint Nicolas, on the ninth of May, a wild duck with her little ducklings came to the Church of Saint-Nicolas. The duck entered the church, flew before the image of the Blessed Liberator, and celebrated him by batting her wings; then she returned to the pond, having left one of her young ones behind as an offering. Some time later, the duckling went home too, though no one had seen it go. For two hundred years and more, the duck, and always the same duck, has come back with her brood, always on the same day, to the Church of Saint-Nicolas, in Montfort. This story was written down and printed in 1652. The author remarks, rightly enough, that “a wretched little duck is not a very considerable thing in the eyes of God, yet still she renders homage to God’s greatness: Saint Francis’s cicada was of even less account, yet his trilling charmed the heart of a seraph.” But Madame de Chateaubriand followed a false tradition. In her version of the ballad, the girl imprisoned at Montfort was a princess who had herself been changed into a duck, in order to escape her captor’s violence. I can recall but one verse of my mother’s song:
The beautiful maid was made a duck,
Was made a duck, was made a duck,
And through the lattice off she flew till
She came to a pond full of lentils.