The Comte de Bedée's house[50] was a league away from Plancoët, in a high and cheerful position. Everything about it breathed gladness: my uncle's gaiety was inexhaustible. He had three daughters, Caroline, Marie and Flore, and one son, the Comte de La Bouëtardais, a counsellor to the Parliament, all of whom shared his light-heartedness. Monchoix was filled with cousins from the neighbourhood; they made music, danced, hunted, and revealed from morning till night. My aunt, Madame de Bedée[51], who saw my uncle gaily squandering his capital and his income, was very properly vexed; but no one listened to her, and her ill-humour but increased the good-humour of her family, the more so as my aunt herself displayed a number of eccentricities: she always had a great snarling hound lying in her lap, and was followed by a tame boar, which filled the house with its grunts. When I came from my father's house, so sombre and so silent, to this house of noise and merry-making, I felt myself in a genuine paradise. The contrast became more striking when my family were settled in the country: the change from Combourg to Monchoix was a change from the wilderness to the world, from the castle-keep of a mediæval baron to the villa of a Roman prince.
On Ascension Day 1775, I set out from my grandmother's house to go to Our Lady of Nazareth, accompanied by my mother, my aunt de Boisteilleul, my uncle de Bedée and his children, my nurse, and my foster-brother. I wore a white surtout, white shoes, gloves, and hat, and a blue silk sash. We went up to the Abbaye at ten o'clock in the morning. The convent, which stood by the road-side, derived an appearance of age from a quincunx of elms dating back to John V. of Brittany[52]. The quincunx led to the cemetery; it was only through the region of the tombstones that the Christian could reach the church: it is death which admits to the presence of God.
The monks were already seated in their stalls; the altar was lighted with a multitude of candles; lamps hung from the different arches: Gothic edifices offer successive distances and, as it were, horizons. The bedels met me at the door, in state, and conducted me to the choir. Three seats had been prepared; I sat down upon the middle one, my nurse placed herself on my left, my foster-mother on my right.
The mass commenced; at the Offertory, the celebrant turned to me and read some prayers; after which my white clothes were taken off and hung as an ex voto beneath a picture of the Virgin. They then dressed me in a violet-coloured frock. The Prior delivered a discourse upon the efficacy of vows; he recalled the history of the Baron of Chateaubriand who had gone to the East with St Louis; he told me that perhaps I, too, should go to Palestine and visit that Virgin of Nazareth to whom I owed my life, thanks to the prayers of the poor, which were always powerful with God. This monk, who told me the history of my family as Dante's grandfather told him the history of his ancestors, might also, like Cacciaguida, have added to it by predicting my exile[53].
Since the Benedictine's exhortation, I always dreamt of the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and I ended by accomplishing it.
I was consecrated to religion; the wardrobe of my innocence has lain upon its altars: it is not my garments that should today be hung within its temples, but my misfortunes.
I was taken back to Saint-Malo. Saint-Malo is not the Aleth of the Notitia Imperii: Aleth was better placed by the Romans in what is now the suburb of Saint-Servan, in the military port known as Solidor, at the mouth of the Rance. Facing Aleth was a rock, est in conspectu Tenedos[54], not the refuge of the perfidious Greeks, but the retreat of Aaron the Hermit[55], who took up his abode on that island in 507, the date of the victory of Clovis over Alaric[56]: one founded a little convent, the other a great monarchy, two edifices both of which have perished.
Saint-Malo.
Malo, in Latin Maclovius, Macutus, or Machutes, became Bishop of Aleth in 541, and, attracted as he was by Aaron's fame, visited him. As chaplain of the hermit's oratory, after the saint's death he raised a cenobitical church, in prædio Machutis. Malo's name was given to the island, and subsequently to the town, Maclovium, Maclopolis.
Between St. Malo, first Bishop of Aleth, and Blessed John surnamed "of the Gridiron," who was consecrated in 1140 and built the cathedral, came five-and-forty bishops. Aleth was already almost wholly abandoned, and John of the Gridiron transferred the episcopal see from the Roman to the Breton city which was spreading over Aaron's rock.