After descending the hill, we forded a stream, drove on for half-an-hour, and then turned out of the high-road. The carriage rolled along a quincunx in an avenue of yoke-elms, whose crowns were interwoven above our heads: I still remember the moment at which I entered their shade and the feeling of affrighted gladness which I experienced.
On emerging from the darkness of the woods, we crossed a fore-court planted with walnut-trees, adjoining the house and garden of the steward; thence we passed, through a stone gateway, into a grassy court called the Cour Verte. On the right were a long row of stables and a clump of chesnut-trees; on the left, another clump of chesnut-trees. At the end of the court-yard, the lawn of which sloped imperceptibly upwards, appeared the castle between two clusters of trees. Its severe and gloomy frontage presented a curtain crowned with a machicolated, crenulated, covered gallery. This curtain connected two towers unlike in age, materials, height and thickness, which ended in battlements surmounted by a peaked roof, like a cap placed upon a Gothic crown.
Here and there, grated windows broke the bareness of the walls. A wide flight of steps, straight and steep, twenty-two in number, without balusters or hand-rail, took the place of the drawbridge across the moat, which was now filled up: it led to the door of the castle, pierced in the middle of the curtain. Above the door one saw the arms of the Lords of Combourg and the apertures through which had formerly issued the shafts and chains of the drawbridge.
The carriage drew up at the foot of the steps; my father came down to welcome us. The meeting with his family so greatly softened his mood for the moment, that he favoured us with his most gracious looks. We climbed the steps and entered a resonant vestibule, with a pointed arch, through which we passed into a small inner court-yard. From this yard we entered the building looking south over the pond, and joined to the two smaller towers. The whole castle had the shape of a four-wheeled cart. We found ourselves on the same floor in a room formerly known as the Guard-room. A window opened out at either end; two others were cut into the side-wall. To enlarge these four windows, it had been necessary to excavate walls of eight to ten feet in thickness. Two sloping galleries, like the gallery in the Great Pyramid, issued from the two outer angles and led to the small towers. A winding staircase in one of these towers formed a communication between the Guard-room and the upper storey. Such was this portion of the building.
That contained within the frontage of the tall and of the thick tower, commanding a north aspect over the Cour Verte, consisted of a sort of square and sombre dormitory used as a kitchen, in addition to the vestibule, the steps, and a chapel. Above these apartments was the Rolls Hall, or Armoury, or Hall of Birds, or Knights' Hall, so called from a ceiling strewn with blazoned coats-of-arms and painted birds. The embrasures of the narrow trefoil windows were so deep as to form recesses, around which ran a granite seat. Add to this, in different parts of the building, secret passages and staircases, dungeons and cells, a labyrinth of covered and open galleries, and walled-up underground passages, the ramifications of which were unknown; on all sides gloom, silence, and a face of stone: and you see Combourg Castle.
Combourg castle.
A supper served in the Guard-room, at which I ate without constraint, ended the first happy day of my life. True happiness costs little; when it is dear, it is not the real metal.
So soon as I awoke the next morning, I set out to visit the castle grounds and to celebrate my advent to solitude. The steps faced north-west. Seated in the centre of the top step, one saw before him the Cour Verte, and beyond this court a kitchen-garden stretching out between two belts of trees: one, on the right, the quincunx by which we had come, was called the Little Mall; the other, on the left, the Great Mall: the latter was a wood of oaks, beeches, sycamores, elms, and chestnuts. Madame de Sévigné extolled those old shades in her day: since that time, one hundred and forty years had added to their beauty.