She was given me as a plaything; I did not abuse my power; instead of submitting her to my will, I became her defender. She and I were taken every morning to the sisters Couppart, two hunch-backed old women dressed in black, who taught children to read. Lucile read very badly; I still worse. She was scolded; I scratched the sisters' faces; great complaints were carried to my mother. I began to pass for a ne'er-do-well, a rebel, an idler, in short, an ass. These ideas sank into my parents' heads: my father said that all the Chevaliers de Chateaubriand had been hare-hunters, drunkards, and brawlers. My mother sighed and grumbled when she saw the disordered condition of my jacket. Child though I was, my father's remark revolted me; when my mother crowned her remonstrances with a panegyric on my brother, whom she called a Cato, a hero, I felt inclined to do all the ill that they seemed to expect of me.
My writing-master, M. Desprès, who wore a pig-tail, was no more satisfied with me than were my parents; he was eternally making me copy, from a slip in his own writing, the following couplet, which I came to detest, not by reason of any error of construction that it may contain:
C'est à vous, mon esprit, à qui je veux parler:
Vous avez des défauts que je ne puis celer[44].
He accompanied his reprimands with cuffs in my neck, calling me tête d'achôcre: did he mean ἀχὼρ[45]? I do not know what a tête d'achôcre is, but I take it to be something frightful.
Saint-Malo is a mere rock. Originally rising from the middle of a salt marsh, it became an island in 709 through an incursion of the sea, which hollowed out the gulf and set Mont Saint-Michel amid the waves. Nowadays the rock of Saint-Malo is attached to the mainland only by a causeway poetically designated as the Sillon, or Furrow. The Sillon is on one side assaulted by the open sea, and on the other washed by the flowing tide, which turns to enter the harbour. In 1730 it was almost entirely destroyed by a storm. At ebb-tide the harbour is dry, displaying on its edge east and north of the sea a beach of the most beautiful sand. It is then possible to walk round my paternal nest. Near and far are strewn rocks, forts, uninhabited islets: the Fort-Royal, the Conchée, Césembre, and the Grand-Bé, where my tomb will be. I unwittingly made a good choice: bé, in Breton, means tomb.
At the end of the Furrow, a Calvary stands upon a sandy knoll jutting out into the open sea. This knoll is called the Hoguette; it is crowned with an old gallows: we used to play puss-in-the-corner between its posts, disputing their possession with the birds of the sea-shore. It was not, however, without a certain sense of fright that we stopped in that place.
There, too, are the Miels, downs on which the sheep used to graze; to the right are meadows below Paramé, the posting-road to Saint-Servan, a Calvary, and wind mills standing on rising ground, like those on Achilles' Tomb at the entrance to the Hellespont.
I reached my seventh year; my mother took me to Plancoët, to be released from my nurse's vow; we stayed at my grandmother's. If ever I have known happiness, it was certainly in that house.
My grandmother.