The Château of Combourg is one of those indescribable picturesque fourteenth and fifteenth century structures which owe much to situation and environment. It has a picturesquely disposed market clustered about it, so that the cries of porkers and their venders mingle with the stately pealing of the bell of the great clock, which rings out not only the hour, but the “quarters” in a most sonorous note.
The costumes of both the men and women of the region around Combourg are exceedingly picturesque and novel; the men with blouse and jacket, and the women in black and the coifs of Becherel, Hédé, Tentêniac, and Miniac; all somewhat resembling one another, and that of Miniac looking more like a great white-winged bishop’s mitre than anything else.
Coif of Miniac
More anciently Combourg Château was a feudal fortress, in an old building of which, now swallowed up in the surrounding structures, the infancy of René Chateaubriand was spent. There is also an old tower dating from 1016, built by Gingoneus, a bishop of Dol. The present château belongs to the Countess of Chateaubriand, and is visible to the curious public on Wednesday afternoons.
The hall, the library, which contains the writing-table of the author of the “Genius of Christianity,” and his bedroom, where is the little iron bed on which he died in Paris,—all go to make of this a literary shrine of prime importance.
The Château of Combourg has a legend, too, but since it concerns only the skeleton of a cat, which in life was supposed to be the reincarnation of a former Count of Combourg, it seems unworthy of repetition here.