Paris, October 1821
AS MADAME de Chateaubriand was a true saint, she obtained the Bishop of Saint-Malo’s promise to give me tonsure. The good man had some scruples about it. Bestowing the ecclesiastical mark on a military man seemed to him a profanation approaching simony. M. Courtois de Pressigny, today the Archbishop of Besançon and a peer of France, is a good and worthy man. He was young then. The Queen was his protector, and he was on the high road to fortune, which he later reached by a better route: persecution.
I knelt at the feet of this priest—dressed in my uniform, sword at my side—and he cut two or three locks of hair from the crown of my head. This was called tonsure, and I was given formal letters to prove it. With these letters, two hundred thousand livres a year would devolve to me, once my proofs of nobility had been accepted in Malta: an abuse, without question, of the ecclesiastical order, but a useful thing in the old political order. Wasn’t it better for this sort of military benefice to be attached to the sword of a soldier than to the cloak of an abbot, who would have eaten up his fat revenues on the sidewalks of Paris?
The tonsure, conferred on me for reasons already mentioned, has caused some ill-informed biographers to say that I was once a man of the Church.
This happened in 1788. I had horses then, and I used to go riding in the country or galloping alongside the waves, my moaning friends of old: I would get down from my horse and frolic with them. All the baying family of Scylla jumped at my knees and nuzzled me: Nunc vada latrantis Scyllae.[4] I have gone far to admire natural scenes, but I should have been content with those offered me by my native lands.
Nothing is more charming than the landscape around Saint-Malo. The banks of the Rance, from the mouth of the river down to Dinan, are enough to warrant any traveler’s attention: a continuous mixture of rock and verdure, beaches and forests, brooks and hamlets, ancient manors of feudal Brittany and modern houses of commercial Brittany. These latter houses were built at a time when the merchants of Saint-Malo were so rich that on spree days they used to fricassee pennies and throw them out the window to the crowd. They are extremely luxurious. Bonabant, the château of the Messieurs de Lasaudre, is built partly of marble imported from Genoa and has a magnificence that we scarcely imagine even in Paris. La Brillantais, Le Beau, Montmarin, La Balue, and Le Combier are, or were, adorned with orangeries, gushing fountains, and statues. Sometimes, the gardens slope down to the shore behind arcades formed by a portico of linden trees, through a colonnade of pine trees, to the end of a lawn. Over the tulip beds, the sea displays its ships, its calms, and its tempests.
Every peasant, sailor, and farmer owns a little white cottage with a garden. Among the potted herbs, the gooseberries, the roses, the irises, and the marigolds, you will find a shoot of Cayenne tea, a head of Virginia tobacco, or a Chinese flower: some souvenir of another shore and another sun, which forms the itinerary and the map of the gardener. The tenant farmers on the coast are of good Norman stock. The women are tall, slim, nimble; they wear gray woolen bodices, short petticoats made of calimanco and striped silk, and white stockings stitched with colorful clocks. Their foreheads are shaded by tall dimity or chambray headdresses whose flaps can either be turned up like a cap or worn loose like a veil. A silver chain hangs in knotted loops at their left side. Every morning, in spring, these daughters of the North step down from their boats as if they were invading the region once again. They carry baskets of fruit and scallop shells filled with curds to sell at market. When they steady with one hand the black jugs of milk or flowers balanced on their heads, and the white strings of their bonnets set off their blue eyes, their pink faces, and their blond hair beaded with dew, not even the Valkyries of the Edda, of whom the youngest is the Future, or the Canephori of Athens could have looked so graceful.[5] Does this picture still bear some resemblance to reality? These women, no doubt, are no more. Nothing remains of them but my memories.