On leaving my mother's breast I underwent my first exile: I was banished to Plancoët, a pretty village situated between Dinan, Saint-Malo and Lamballe. My mother's only brother, the Comte de Bedée, had built a house near the village, to which he gave the name of Monchoix. My maternal grand-mother's property stretched from this neighbourhood to the market-town of Courseul, the Curiosolites of Cæsar's Commentaries. My grandmother, since many years a widow, lived with her sister, Mademoiselle de Boisteilleul, in a hamlet divided from Plancoët by a bridge, and known as the Abbaye, from a Benedictine abbey dedicated to Our Lady of Nazareth.
My nurse's vow.
My nurse was sterile; another poor Christian took me to her breast. She vowed me to the patron of the hamlet, Our Lady of Nazareth, and promised that I should wear blue and white in her honor for seven years. I had lived but a few hours, and already the weight of years was marked upon my brow. Why did they not let me die? God in His wisdom granted to the prayer of humbleness and innocence the preservation of a life for which a vain renown was lying in wait.
This vow of the Breton peasant woman is no longer in the spirit of the age: yet nothing can be more touching than the intervention of a Divine Mother coming between Heaven and the child and sharing the terrestrial mother's solicitude.
After three years I was brought back to Saint-Malo. Already seven years had elapsed since my father had recovered the domain of Combourg. He wished to gain possession of the estates where his ancestors had lived and died; and unable to treat for the purchase of the manor of Beaufort, which had passed to the Goyon family, or for the barony of Chateaubriand, which had fallen into the hands of the House of Condé, he turned his attention to Combourg, which is spelt "Combour"[36] in Froissart, and which has been held by various branches of my family through their inter-marriages with the Coëtquens. Combourg served as a defense to Brittany in the Norman and English marches: it was built in 1016 by Junken, Bishop of Dol; the great tower dates to 1100. The Marshal de Duras[37], who held Combourg by right of his wife, Maclovie de Coëtquen, whose mother was a Chateaubriand, came to terms with my father. The Marquis du Hallay[38], an officer in the Mounted Grenadiers of the Royal Guards, perhaps too well known for his valor, is the last of the Coëtquen Chateaubriands: M. du Hallay has a brother. The same Maréchal de Duras, in his quality as our ally, subsequently presented my brother and myself to Louis XVI.
I was intended for the Royal Navy: a distaste for Court life was natural to any Breton, and particularly to my father. This feeling was strengthened in him by the aristocratic character of our States.
When I was brought home to Saint-Malo, my father was at Combourg, my brother at Saint-Brieuc College; my four sisters were living with my mother. All the latter's affections were centered upon her eldest son: not that she did not love her other children, but she showed a blind preference for the young Comte de Combourg. True, I had, as a boy, as the youngest-born, as the "chevalier," as I was called, certain privileges not shared by my sisters; but, upon the upshot, I was left to the care of the servants. Moreover, my mother, full of intelligence and virtue, was largely taken up with social claims and religious duties. The Comtesse de Plouër, my godmother, was her intimate friend; she also saw Maupertuis'[39] family and the Abbé Trublet's[40]. She loved politics, excitement, society: for people talked politics at Saint-Malo like the monks in the Cedron hollow[41]; and she threw herself with ardor into the La Chalotais[42] affair. She would bring home with her a cross humour, an absent-mindedness, a spirit of parsimony, which at first prevented one from recognising her admirable qualities. She was methodical, and showed no method in the management of her children; generous, and appeared avaricious; gentle, yet ever scolding: my father was the terror of the servants, my mother their scourge.
Such were the dispositions of my parents, whence sprang the earliest feelings of my life. I attached myself to the woman who took care of me, an excellent creature called Villeneuve, whose name I write with a movement of gratitude and with tears in my eyes. Villeneuve was a sort of superintendent of the household; she carried me in her arms, gave me, by stealth, anything she could come across, wiped away my tears, kissed me, pushed me into a corner, took me out, and constantly muttering: "There's one who won't grow up proud, who has a good heart, who does not snub poor people! Here, little fellow," she would stuff me with sugar and wine.
My sister Lucile.
Soon my childish affection for Villeneuve was controlled by a worthier friendship. Lucile, my fourth sister, was two years older than I[43]. Neglected as the youngest, she was given none save her sisters' left-off clothes to wear. Imagine a little thin girl, too tall for her age, with loose-jointed arms, shy, speaking with difficulty, and unable to learn a thing; dress her in a frock taken from a child of a different size and shape; confine her chest in a quilted corset the gores of which cut wounds into her ribs; hold up her neck with an iron collar cased in brown velvet; dress her hair back upon the top of her head, fasten it with a cap of black stuff, and you see before you the wretched object that struck my eyes on returning to the paternal roof. No one would have suspected in the puny Lucile the talent and beauty with which she was one day to shine.