My grandmother entrusted to her son René the care of her son Pierre, M. de Chateaubriand du Plessis[26] whose son, Armand de Chateaubriand, was shot, by order of Bonaparte, on Good Friday[27] 1809. He was one of the last of the French nobles to die for the cause of the monarchy. My father took charge of his brother's fate, although the habit of suffering had endowed him with a sternness of character that lasted through his life. Non ignara mali is not always a true saying: unhappiness has its harsh as well as its gentle side.

M. de Chateaubriand was tall and spare; he had an aquiline nose and thin, pale lips; his eyes were deep-set, small, and of a bluish or sea-green color, like the eyes of lions or of the barbarians of olden time. I have never seen an expression like theirs: when inflamed with anger, each flashing pupil seemed to shoot out and strike you like a bullet.

My father was governed by one sole passion, that of his name. His general condition was one of deep sadness, which increased with age, and of a silence from which he issued only in fits of anger. Avaricious in the hope of restoring to his family its pristine splendour, haughty of demeanour with the nobles at the States of Brittany, harsh with his dependants at Combourg, taciturn, despotic and threatening at home, the feeling which the sight of him inspired was one of fear. Had he lived until the Revolution, and had he been younger, he would have played a great part, or got himself massacred in his castle. He was certainly possessed of genius: I have no doubt that, at the head of an administration or an army, he would have been a man out of the ordinary.

He first thought of marriage on returning from America. Born on the 23rd of September 1718, he was thirty-five years of age when, on the 3rd of July 1753, he married Apolline Jeanne Suzanne de Bedée, born 7 April 1726, and daughter of Messire Ange Annibal Comte de Bedée, Seigneur de La Bouëtardais. He took up his residence with her at Saint-Malo, within seven or eight leagues of which both of them had been born, so that their house commanded the horizon under which they had first seen the light. My maternal grandmother, Marie Anne de Ravenel de Boisteilleul, Dame de Bedée, born at Rennes on the 16th of October 1698, had been brought up at Saint-Cyr during the last years of Madame de Maintenon: her education had left its mark upon her daughters.

My mother was endowed with great wit and intelligence, and with a prodigious imagination; her mind had been formed by the works of Fénelon, Racine, Madame de Sévigné, and stored with anecdotes of the Court of Louis XIV.; she knew the whole of Cyrus[28] by heart. Apolline de Bedée was dark, short and ill-favoured, with large features; the elegance of her manners, the vivacity of her temperament, formed a contrast with my father's stiffness and calm. Loving society as much as he loved solitude, as humoursome and animated as he was cold and unimpassioned, she had no tastes but what were opposed to her husband's. The antagonism which she encountered saddened her naturally gay and light-hearted disposition. Obliged to hold her tongue when she would have wished to speak, she made amends to herself by a kind of clamorous melancholy broken with sighs which alone interrupted my father's silent gloom. For piety my mother was an angel.

*

My mother was brought to bed at Saint-Malo of an eldest son, who died in the cradle and was christened Geoffroy, like almost all the first-born of my family. This son was followed by another and by two daughters, none of whom lived more than a few months.

My birth and baptism.

These four children died of an extravasation of blood on the brain. At last my mother bore a third son, who was named Jean-Baptiste: it was he who later married M. de Malesherbes' grand-daughter. After Jean-Baptiste came four daughters: Marie-Anne, Bénigne, Julie and Lucile, all four endowed with rare beauty; the two eldest alone survived the storms of the Revolution. Beauty, that serious trifle, remains when all the rest has passed away. I was the last of the ten children. Probably my four sisters owed their existence to my father's desire to assure the perpetuation of his name through the arrival of a second boy; I resisted, I had an aversion to life.

Here is my baptismal certificate[29]: