[BOOK I][1]
Birth of my brothers and sisters—My own birth-Plancoët—I am vowed—Combourg—My father's scheme of education for me—Villeneuve—Lucile—Mesdemoiselles Couppart—I am a bad pupil—The life led by my maternal grandmother and her sister at Plancoët—My uncle, the Comte de Bedée, at Monchoix—I am relieved from my nurse's vow—Holidays—Saint-Malo—Gesril—Hervine Magon—Fight with two ship's lads.
Four years ago, on my return from the Holy Land, I purchased near the little village of Aulnay, in the neighbourhood of Sceaux[2] and Châtenay, a small country-house, lying hidden among wooded hills. The sandy and uneven ground attached to this house consisted of a sort of wild orchard, at the end of which was a ravine and a coppice of chestnut-trees. This narrow space seemed to me fitted to contain my long hopes: spatio brevi spem longam reseces[3]. The trees which I have planted here are thriving. They are still so small that I can shade them by placing myself between them and the sun. One day they will give me shade and protect my old age as I have protected their youth. I have selected them, in so far as I could, from the different climes in which I have wandered; they recall my travels and foster other illusions in my heart.
If ever the Bourbons reascend the throne, I will ask from them no greater reward for my loyalty than that they should make me rich enough to add to my fee-simple the skirts of the surrounding woods: I have grown ambitious, and would wish to expand my walks by a few roods. Knight-errant though I be, I have the sedentary tastes of a monk: I doubt whether, since taking up my abode in this retreat, I have thrice set foot without my boundary. If my pines, my fir-trees, my larches, my cedars ever keep their promise, the Vallée-aux-Loups will become a veritable hermitage. When, on the 20th of February 1694,[4] Voltaire saw the light at Châtenay, what was then the appearance of the hill to which the author of the Génie du Christianisme was to retire in 1807?
This spot pleases me; it has taken the place of my paternal acres; I have bought it with the price of my dreams and my vigils; I owe the little wilderness of Aulnay to the vast wilderness of Atala; and I have not, in order to acquire this refuge, imitated the American planter and despoiled the Indian of the Two Floridas[5]. I am attached to my trees; I have addressed elegies to them, sonnets, odes. There is not one of them which I have not tended with my own hands, which I have not rid of the worm attached to its roots, the caterpillar clinging to its leaves; I know them all by their names, as though they were my children: they are my family, I have no other, and I hope to die in their midst.
Here, I have written the Martyrs, the Abencerages, the Itinéraire and Moïse; what shall I do now during these autumn evenings? This 4th day of October 1811, the anniversary of my saint's-day[6] and of my entrance into Jerusalem,[7] tempts me to commence the history of my life. The man who today is endowing France with the empire of the world only so that he may trample her under foot, the man whose genius I admire and whose despotism I abhor, that man surrounds me with his tyranny as it were with a new solitude; but though he may crush the present, the past defies him, and I remain free in all that precedes his glory.
The greater part of my feelings have remained buried in the recesses of my soul, or are displayed in my works only as applied to imaginary beings. To-day, while I still regret, without pursuing, my illusions, I will reascend the acclivity of my happier years: these Memoirs shall be a shrine erected to the clearness of my remembrances.
My birth and ancestry.
Let us commence, then, and speak first of my family. This is essential, because the character of my father depended in a great measure upon his position and, in its turn, exercised a great influence upon the nature of my ideas, by determining the manner of my education[8].