"Monsieur le chevalier," he said, "you must renounce your follies. Your brother has procured you a sub-lieutenant's commission in the Navarre Regiment. You will go first to Rennes, and thence to Cambrai. Here are a hundred louis: be sparing with them. I am old and ill; I have not long to live. Conduct yourself as a good man and never disgrace your name."
He kissed me. I felt that severe, wrinkled face press with emotion against mine: it was the last paternal embrace I was to receive.
At that moment the Comte de Chateaubriand, a man so formidable in my eyes, appeared to me only as a father most worthy of my affection. I flung myself upon his emaciated hand and wept. He was threatened with an approaching attack of paralysis, which brought him to the grave; his left arm had a convulsive movement which he was obliged to check with his right hand. He was thus holding his arm when, after giving me his old sword, without leaving me time to recover myself, he led me to the cabriolet which was waiting for me in the Cour Verte. He made me get in before him. The post-boy drove off, while I with my eyes bade farewell to my mother and sister, who dissolved into tears on the steps.
I drove along the road by the pond; I saw the reeds of my swallows, the mill-stream and the meadow; I cast a look at the castle. Then, like Adam after his sin, I proceeded towards unknown ground, and "the world was all before me[175]."
*
Last visits to Combourg.
From that day I saw Combourg but three times: after my father's death we met, in mourning, to share our inheritance and take leave of each other. On another occasion I accompanied my mother to Combourg: she was engaged in furnishing the castle, in expectation of the arrival of my brother, who was to bring my sister-in-law to Brittany. My brother did not come; he was soon, with his young wife, to receive at the hands of the executioner a different pillow from that prepared by my mother's hands. Lastly, I passed through Combourg a third time on my road to Saint-Malo to embark for America. The castle was abandoned, I had to put up at the steward's lodge. Wandering through the Great Mall, from the bottom of a dark avenue I caught sight of the deserted steps, the closed door and windows, and fainted away. I had difficulty in making my way back to the village: I sent for my horses and left in the middle of the night.
After an absence of fifteen years, and before again leaving France on my visit to the Holy Land, I went to Fougères to embrace what remained of my family. I had not the courage to undertake the pilgrimage to the fields to which the most vivid portion of my existence was attached. It is in the woods of Combourg that I became what I am, that I began to feel the first attacks of the weariness which I have dragged with me through life, of the sadness which has been my torment and my felicity. There I sought for a heart that could beat in touch with mine; there I saw my family united only to disperse. My father there dreamt of his name restored, of the fortunes of his house revived: another illusion which time and the revolutions have dispelled. Of six children that we were, we remain but three: my brother, Julie and Lucile are no more, my mother died of grief, my father's ashes were snatched from his grave.
If my works survive me, if I am to leave a name behind me, perhaps one day, prompted by these Memoirs, some traveller will come to visit the spots I have depicted. He will be able to recognize the castle; but he will look in vain for the great wood: the cradle of my dreams has vanished like those dreams. Left standing alone upon its rock, the ancient keep mourns the oaks, the old friends that surrounded it and protected it against the storm. Isolated also, I too have seen falling around me the family which beautified my days and lent me its shelter: fortunately my life is not built upon the earth so solidly as the towers in which I spent my youth, nor does man offer to the tempests a resistance so great as that of the monuments raised by his hands.