Paris, October 1821
I LEFT my mother and went to see my elder sisters near Fougères. I stayed for a month with Madame de Châteaubourg. Her two country houses, Lascardais and Le Plessis, close to Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier, famous for its tower and its battle, were situated in a country of rocks, moors, and woodlands. For her steward, my sister had a man named M. Livoret, formerly a Jesuit, who had stumbled into a strange adventure.
When M. Livoret was appointed the steward of Lascardais, the elder Comte de Châteaubourg had only recently died. M. Livoret, who had never met him, was installed as the caretaker of the castle. The first night he slept there alone, he saw a pale old man in a dressing gown and a nightcap come into his bedroom holding a short candle. The apparition went to stand beside the hearth, placed his candlestick on the mantel, rekindled the fire, and then sat down in an armchair: M. Livoret trembled all over. After two hours of silence, the old man stood up, took his candlestick, and left the room, closing the door behind him.
The next day the steward recounted his adventure to the farmers, who, after listening to his description of the lemur, said they were sure it was their former master. But it did not end there. For if M. Livoret glanced behind him in the forest, he would see the phantom; if he had to climb over a stile in the fields, the shade would be straddling the wall beside him. One day, the poor persecuted wretch worked up the courage to say to the ghost, “Monsieur de Châteaubourg, please leave me alone.”
To which the ghost replied, “No.”
M. Livoret, a cold and matter-of-fact man with no great powers of imagination, would retell this story to anyone who wanted to hear it, always in the same tone of voice and with the same conviction.
Not long after, I traveled to Normandy with a brave officer who had suffered an attack of brain fever. We were given lodgings in a farmhouse. An old tapestry lent to us by the owner of the place separated my bed from the bed of the sick man. Behind this tapestry, the patient was bled and, to ease his suffering, plunged repeatedly into icy baths. He shivered under this torture. His nails turned blue, his face purple and haggard. He gritted his teeth. His head was shaven, and the long beard that grew down from his pointed chin was the only thing that covered his bare, wet, emaciated chest. Whenever the sick man started to weep, he opened an umbrella, thinking it would shelter him from his tears. If this strategy had proved effective, a statue should have been erected in his honor.
My only happy moments were those when I went for walks in the churchyard of this hilltop hamlet. My companions were the dead, a few birds, and the setting sun. As I walked, I would daydream about Paris society, my childhood, my sylph, and the woods of Combourg: so near in space, so distant in time. After a while, I would go back to my poor sick man. It was the blind leading the blind.
Alas! A blow to the head, a fall, an affliction of the brain could rob even Homer, Newton, or Bossuet of his genius. Then these exalted men, instead of exciting our profound pity, our bitter and eternal regret, would become the objects of our smiles! Many people I have known and loved have seen their reason disturbed in my presence, as if I carried the germ of the contagion within me. I can understand the cruel gaiety of Cervantes’s masterpiece only through a melancholy meditation: considering the whole of human existence, weighing good and evil, one might be tempted to wish for any accident that brings forgetfulness, as a means of escaping from oneself. A happy drunk is a fortunate creature. Religion aside, happiness comes of being ignorant of yourself and arriving in the grave without having felt the sting of life.
I brought back my compatriot completely cured.