She had a long and plaintive ballad on the subject of the Récit veritable d'une cane sauvage en la ville de Montfort-la-Cane-lez-Saint-Malo. A certain lord had imprisoned a young and very beautiful girl in the Castle of Montfort, with the intention of ravishing her. Through a dormer-window she could see the church of St. Nicholas; she prayed to the saint with eyes full of tears, and was miraculously wafted outside the castle. But she fell into the hands of the traitor's servants, who proposed to do by her as they presumed their master had done. The poor girl, distraught, looking to every side in search of help, saw only the wild-duck upon the pond of the castle. Renewing her prayers to St. Nicholas, she besought him to allow these birds to be the witnesses of her innocence, so that, if she was doomed to lose her life, and was unable to accomplish the vows which she had taken to St. Nicholas, the birds themselves would fulfill them in their own way, 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 St. Nicholas, 9 May, a wild-duck, accompanied by its brood of ducklings, came to St. Nicholas' Church. She entered the building, fluttered before the statue of the Blessed Liberator, and acclaimed him by flapping her wings; after which she returned to the pond, leaving one of her little ones as an offering. Some time afterwards, the duckling disappeared unobserved. For two hundred years and more, the duck, always the same duck, returned, on a fixed day, with her hatch, to the church of the great St. Nicholas at Montfort.
The story was written and printed in 1652: the author very justly observes that "a poor wild-duck is not a very considerable thing in the eyes of God; that nevertheless she acts her part in doing homage to His greatness; that St. François' grasshopper was of even less account, and that nevertheless its trill charmed a seraph's heart."
But Madame de Chateaubriand followed a false legend: in her ballad, the maiden imprisoned at Montfort was a princess, who succeeded in being changed into a duck in order to escape her captor's violence. I remember only the following lines of one stanza of my mother's ballad:
Cane la belle est devenue,
Cane la belle est devenue,
Et s'envola par une grille,
Dans un étang plein de lentilles[293].
As Madame de Chateaubriand was a real saint, she obtained the Bishop of Saint-Malo's promise to give me the tonsure, although he had a scruple on the subject: to bestow the mark of an ecclesiastic upon a layman and a soldier appeared to him to be a profanation not far removed from simony. M. Cortois de Pressigny, now Archbishop of Besançon and a peer of France, is a worthy and deserving man. He was young at that time, protected by the Queen, and on the high-road to fortune, which he attained later by a better road: persecution.
Dressed in uniform, and wearing my sword, I went down on my knees at the prelate's feet; he cut two or three hairs from the crown of my head: this was called the tonsure, of which I received a formal certificate. With this certificate, it was possible for an income of 200,000 livres to fall to me, when my proofs of nobility had been admitted in Malta: an abuse, no doubt, in the ecclesiastical order, but a useful thing in the political order of the old constitution. Was it not better that a kind of military benefice should be attached to the sword of a soldier than to the cloak of an Abbé who would have spent the revenues of his fat living on the pavement of Paris?
The fact that the tonsure was conferred on me for the foregoing reasons has caused ill-informed biographers to state that I had at one time entered the Church.
This happened in 1788. I kept horses, I rode all over the country, or galloped beside the waves, the moaning friends of my youth: I alighted from my horse and frolicked with them; the whole barking family of Scylla sprang to my knees to fondle me: Nunc vada latrantis Scyllæ. I have travelled very far to admire the scenes of nature: I might have contented myself with those which my native land offered to my eyes.
Nothing could be more charming than the country for five or six leagues round Saint-Malo. The banks of the Rance alone, as one ascends the river from its mouth to Dinan, ought to attract the traveller, forming a constant medley of rocks and verdure, of strands and forests, of creeks and hamlets, of the ancient manors of feudal Brittany and the modern habitations of commercial Brittany. The latter were built at a time when the merchants of Saint-Malo were so rich that, on days of merry-making, they heated piastres and flung them red-hot to the people through the windows. These dwellings are very luxurious. Bonnaban, the country-seat of Messieurs de La Saudre[294], is in part built of marble brought from Genoa, a magnificence of which we in Paris have no idea. The Briantais[295], the Bosq, the Montmarin[296], the Balue[297], the Colombier[298] are, or were, adorned with orangeries, fountains, and statues. In some cases the gardens slope down to the shore behind the arcade formed by a screen of lime-trees, through a colonnade of pine-trees, to the end of a lawn; across a bed of tulips, the sea displays its ships, its calms, and its tempests.