I delight in recalling these joys which my soul felt but a little while before it became filled with the tribulations of the world. Those who compare these ardours with the transports which I shall presently depict, who see the same heart experiencing, within a space of three or four years, all that is sweetest and most wholesome in innocence and in religion and also all that is most seductive and most baneful in the passions, will choose one of the two forms of joy; they will see in which direction to seek happiness and, above all, peace.
Three weeks after my First Communion, I left Dol College. I retain a pleasant remembrance of this house: our childhood leaves a trace of itself upon places it has beautified by its presence, as a flower communicates a perfume to the objects it has touched. To this day I am affected when I think of the scattering of my first friends and my first masters. The Abbé Leprince was appointed to a living near Rouen, but died soon after; the Abbé Égault received a cure in the Diocese of Rennes; and I saw the death of the good principal, the Abbé Porcher, at the commencement of the Revolution: he was a learned, gentle, and simple-hearted man. The memory of that obscure Rollin[121] will always be dear and venerable to me.
*
At Combourg I found a Mission on which to feed my piety; I followed its exercises. I received confirmation on the manor steps, with the peasant lads and lasses, from the hand of the Bishop of Saint-Malo. After that, a cross was erected; I helped to hold it, while it was being fixed upon its base. It still exists: it stands in front of the tower in which my father died. For thirty years, it has seen no one appear at the windows of that tower; it is no longer saluted by the castle children; every spring-time it waits for them in vain; it sees none return save the swallows, the companions of my childhood, more faithful to their nest than man to his house. How happy should I have been, had my life been spent at the foot of that mission cross, had my hair been whitened only by the years which have covered the arms of that cross with moss!
I go to Rennes College.
I did not long delay my departure for Rennes, where I was to continue my studies and complete my mathematical course, before submitting myself for examination as a Naval Guard[122] at Brest. M. de Fayolle was principal of Rennes College. The staff of that Breton Juilly[123] included three distinguished professors: the Abbé de Chateaugiron, master of the second form, the Abbé Germé, master of rhetoric, and the Abbé Marchand, of physics. There were a large number of boarders and day-scholars, and the classes were strong. Within living memory, Geoffroy[124] and Ginguené[125], who were educated at the college, would have done honour to Sainte-Barbe[126] or the Plessis. The Chevalier de Parny[127] had also studied at Rennes; I succeeded to his bed in the room allotted to me.
Rennes seemed to me a Babylon, the college a world. The crowd of masters and school-boys, the size of the buildings, garden, and play-grounds appeared immense to my eyes[128]. I grew accustomed to it, however. On the saint's-day of the principal, we had a holiday; at the top of our voices we sang in his praise superb lines of our own composing, in which we said:
Ô Terpsichore, ô Polymnie,
Venez, venez remplir nos vœux;
La raison même vous convie[129].
At the cost of a few buffets, I assumed over my new schoolfellows the same ascendant that I had exercised over my old companions at Dol. The young Bretons are quarrelsome monkeys; on half-holidays we sent each other challenges to fight in the shrubbery of the garden of the Benedictines, called "the Thabor." Our arms consisted of compasses fastened to the end of a walking-stick, which gradually led to a hand-to-hand fight, more or less treacherous or courteous according to the gravity of the challenge. We had umpires who decided if battle was to be waged and how the champions should use their hands. The combat did not end until one of the two parties owned himself vanquished. I found my old friend Gesril presiding over these engagements, as at Saint-Malo. He offered to be my second in an affair in which I was engaged with Saint-Riveul[130], a young noble who became the first victim of the Revolution. I fell under my adversary, refused to surrender, and paid dearly for my pride. I said, like Jean Desmarets[131] on his road to the scaffold, "I cry mercy to God alone!"