"It is time for you to take a decision; your brother is in a position to obtain a benefice for you; but before going to the seminary, you must take good counsel with yourself, for although I wish you to adopt the ecclesiastical state, I would rather see you a man of the world than a scandalous priest."
Those who have read the foregoing pages will be able to judge if the proposal of my pious mother came at a good moment. I have always, in the more important events of my life, at once known what to avoid: I am prompted by a movement of honor. As a priest, I struck myself as ridiculous. As a bishop, the majesty of the sacerdotal office overawed me, and I respectfully recoiled before the altar. Should I, as a bishop, make efforts to acquire virtues, or content myself with hiding my vices? I felt myself too weak to take the first course, too candid to adopt the second. They who treat me as a hypocrite and an ambitious man know me but little; I shall never succeed in the world, precisely because I lack one passion and one vice: ambition and hypocrisy. The first of these would with me be at the most a form of injured self-love; I might sometimes wish to be a minister or king in order to laugh at my enemies; but in twenty-four hours I should throw my portfolio or my crown out of window.
My new career.
I therefore told my mother that my religious vocation was not sufficiently strong. For the second time I changed my plans: I had refused to become a sailor, and now I was no longer willing to be a priest. There remained the military career, which I loved: but how to suffer the loss of my independence and the restraint of European discipline? I took an absurd idea into my head: I declared that I would go to Canada and clear forests, or to India and take service in the armies of the princes of that country. By one of those contrasts which we perceive in all men, my father, so reasonable in other respects, was never greatly shocked by an adventurous project. He chided my mother for my fickleness, but decided to ship me to India. I was dispatched to Saint-Malo, where an expedition was being fitted out for Pondicherry.
*
Two months elapsed: I found myself back and alone in my maternal island. Villeneuve had just died there. I went to weep for her beside the poor, empty bed on which she had breathed her last, and saw the little wicker go-cart in which I had learnt to stand upright upon this world of sorrows. I pictured my old nurse lying on her pillow and fixing her feeble gaze upon that basket on wheels: this first memorial of my life opposite the last memorial of the life of my second mother, the thought of the wishes for the happiness of her nursling which the kind Villeneuve addressed to Heaven on leaving this world, this proof of an attachment so constant, disinterested and pure broke my heart with tenderness, gratitude and regret.
I found nothing else to remind me of my past at Saint-Malo: in the harbor I sought in vain for the ships in whose rigging I had played; they were gone or broken up; in the town, the house where I was born had been turned into an inn. I was scarce out of my cradle, and already a whole world had fallen into decay. I was a stranger in the parts of my childhood; people who met me asked who I was, for the sole reason that my head rose a few inches higher above the ground towards which it will sink again in a few years. How rapidly and how often we change our manner of existence and our illusions! Friends leave us, others take their place; our ties alter: there is always a time at which we possessed nothing of what we now possess, at which we have nothing of what we once had. Man has not one self-same life: he has several on end, and that is his calamity.
*
Henceforward friendless and alone, I explored the beach which had borne my sand-castles: campos ubi Troja fuit. I walked on the shore deserted by the sea. The strand abandoned by the rising tide offered me the picture of those desolate places which our illusions leave around us when they go. Abailard, my fellow-Breton[174], like myself watched these rollers eight hundred years ago, thinking of his Héloïse; like me, he saw some vessel speed (ad horizontis undas), and his ear, like mine, was lulled with the monotone of the waves. I exposed myself to the breakers while indulging in the baleful imaginings which I had brought with me from the woods at Combourg. A head called Cap Lavarde was the limit of my walks: seated at the extremity of this head, I remembered with the bitterest reflections that these same rocks had served to hide me as a child during the fairs; I had there gulped down my tears, while my playmates elated themselves with joy. I felt neither better loved nor happier than at that time. Soon I was to leave the country of my birth to crumble away my days in various climes. These reflections wounded me to death, and I was tempted to let myself fall into the waves.
A letter called me back to Combourg: I arrived, I supped with my family, monsieur my father did not speak a word, my mother sighed, Lucile appeared dismayed. At ten o'clock we retired. I questioned my sister; she knew nothing. At eight o'clock the next morning I was sent for. I went downstairs: my father was waiting for me in his study.