Chapitre I. Chateaubriand's ancestors-His birth-Anecdotes of his childhood

Intended for the navy-Throws up his commission and returns home.

" I AM of noble birth."

That is the curt phrase in which François-René de Chateaubriand presents himself to the readers of his Mémoires d'Outre-tombe. He whose voice reaches them from beyond the grave is no " parvenu," but a patrician of long and illustrious lineage.

Not that it matters-that is the tone he takes. His descent is an " accident" of which he is too good a philosopher to boast; his family history only interests him as an historian. But he has " nephews" who are not philosophers; and he proposes to set forth the particulars for the satisfaction of their pride and curiosity. He does so, and the particulars fill half a volumean intricate genealogical tangle through which we need not try to follow him. A few facts selected from it almost at random will suffice to illustrate the ancient glories of the house.

Brient de Chateaubriand fought by the side of the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings-which the

B I

Chateaubriand and his Court of Women genealogist dates 1067. A Geoffroy de Chateaubriand fought in the crusades with Saint Louis, and there won by his prowess and bravery a new coat of arms bearing the proud motto: " Notre sang a teint la bannière de France." A Guy de Chateaubriand attended Arthur of Brittany on a special embassy to the Pope in 1309. Chateaubriands had married daughters of the royal houses of France, England, and Arragon, and of such great French houses as those of Brittany, Lusignan, Rohan, Laval, and Du Guesclin. A Madame de Chateaubriand had been the "favourite mistress" of François I until she was superseded in his affections by Madame d'Etampes. Et cetera.

Those honours and achievements, however, belonged to the distant past. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the family-and especially the younger branches of it-fell upon evil days. They brought no more loot home from the wars, and received no more grants from the Crown; and, as their families were large, the constant subdivision of their estates brought them, as it brought many Breton nobles of the period, to poverty. Things were not, indeed, quite so bad with them as with those aristocrats of the province whom Bernardin de Saint-Pierre¹ discovered " working as day-labourers, at harvest-time, for the peasants" ; but they were bad enough. René-Auguste de Chateaubriand, who was born in 1718, had to face the world with an annual income of four hundred and sixteen francs.

1 The author of Paul et Virginie. ↩

He was an adventurous youth, resolved, from his earliest childhood, to restore the fallen fortunes of the house. His mother besought him to stay at home and "till the land like his forefathers"; but he preferred to go to sea. He served as a volunteer in the force which Cardinal Fleury sent in 1734 to the relief of Dantzig; he was wrecked on the coast of Spain, and saved from the sea only to be robbed by brigands on the land. Then, somehow or other, he found his way to the West Indies, and, somehow or other, made money there;¹ and then, returning to France, he became a ship-builder-a trade in which Louis XIV encouraged noblemen to engage²—and continued to prosper. He fitted out many privateers, and the privateers brought many prizes home to port; so that, in 1761, he was rich enough to buy from the Duc de Duras the Château de Combourg, a former seat of the heads of his family.

1 Probably in the slave trade. ↩

2 As a rule noblemen could not engage in trade without forfeiting their nobility. B 2 ↩

Meanwhile, in 1753, he had married a daughter of the Comte de Bedée-an old soldier who had fought at Fontenoy; and, in the course of the next fifteen years, ten children were born to him. Four of them died in infancy. The others were Jean-Baptiste, Marie-Anne-Françoise, Bénigne-Jeanne, Julie-Marie-Agathe, Lucile-Angélique, and François-René, the subject of this study, the date of whose birth was September 4, 1768.

The child was father of the man. That is the note struck and sustained throughout those poetical and richly coloured pages of the Mémoires d'Outre-tombe in which Chateaubriand reviews his recollections of his infancy and youth; and it may be that the accuracy of the picture suffers because the autobiographer can only see himself through his later temperament. He was, when he wrote-or he had been-René. He had plucked many Dead Sea apples, and they had all turned to bitter ashes-or so he was persuaded-in his mouth. He had become a personage. His books had marked an epoch, and women had sighed at his feet. But all-or so he said and thought-in vain. Happiness had always eluded him, and gloom had always haunted him; so that melancholy must have set a mark upon him in the cradle. It was the mood-the frame of mind-which we in England know from Byron; but Chateaubriand always affirmed that it originated not with Byron, but with him. He gave the world, he insists, Byronism before the letter; and therefore he looks back upon his childhood and finds that it was Byronic.

an echo, whether conscious or unconscious, of Rousseau's lament over his birth as the first of his misfortunes. He first saw the light on a stormbeaten rock, in the midst of a howling tempest which drowned his infant cries. His godfather was one of the predestined victims of the Terror. "Heaven," he says, "seemed to unite these circumstances that my destiny might be imaged and foreshadowed in my cradle;" and, in the same way, everything that he did, and everything that happened to him, in childhood, figures in his narrative as a presage and a symbol of the empty glories which fate held in store for him.

He was neglected, he says, and misunderstood. His first playmate was his sister Lucile-a Cinderella with no fairy godmother, uncouthly dressed in the others' cast-off clothes. He and she attended a dame school together; and when the dames scolded the little girl for inattention, the little boy flew at them and scratched their faces. It was his first act of chivalry; but his father, when complaint was made to him, only said that the younger sons of the house of Chateaubriand had always been quarrelsome and had never come to any good. Another comrade with whom he got into such mischief as children, left to themselves, ordinarily do get into, was the young Gesril who afterwards died a hero's death at Quiberon Bay.¹ "The link between us," writes Chateaubriand, "was our instinctive sense of the proofs of merit that we were both one day to give ;" but, in the meantime, he, like Gesril, and Gesril, like him, was called a goodfor-nothing.

1 In the course of a Royalist raid, supported by England, and intended to raise Brittany. ↩

At the age of seven, the child was taken to church and vowed, with solemn ritual, to the service of the Virgin. The white robe which he wore for the ceremony was hung up as an ex-voto offering on the church wall; and the preacher discoursed of the brave and pious deeds of his ancestor, the crusader. " After listening to the Benedictine's exhortation," he writes, "I never ceased to dream of that pilgrimage to Jerusalem which now, at last, I have accomplished." And then he adds, " The spoils of my innocence were laid upon the altar. Now, alas! it is not my garments but my sorrows which should be hung up as a votive offering in the temple of God."

A little later he was sent to school at Dol; and there, he tells us, he was sentenced to be whipped for bird's-nesting, but resisted so violently, and protested with such vehemence against the threatened degradation, that those in authority had to bow to his will and substitute another penalty. " And so," he comments, "terminated the first combat in which I defended my honour-that honour which has become the idol of my life, and to which I have so often sacrificed peace, honour and fortune." In another battle for honour his antagonist was a school-fellow. There was a fight, conducted according to the rules, and Chateaubriand was badly beaten, but would not give in. "My cry,' he writes, "was that of Jean Demarest on the way to the scaffold, 'It is from God alone that I will deign to ask for mercy. »

Those are the most typical of the anecdotes which he relates. The note in them is always the same, and always a little forced. The child Chateaubriand is always presented to us as the father of René, obviously predestined to become all that René became: predestined, that is to say, to a pride that could not be broken, to glory and the love of women, and yet to the melancholy of a man of sorrows, to the rarest experiences of all sublime emotions, and yet to the haunting sense of tears in human things. It matters little whether all the stories are quite literally true. They are founded upon fact; and they are artistically true; for the Mémoires d'Outre-tombe which preserves them, whatever it may not be, is at any rate an incomparable work of art.

The profession for which Chateaubriand was intended was the navy. It was to be educated for the navy that he was sent to Dol, and afterwards to Rennes, where his old friend Gesril, and the future General Moreau¹ were among his fellow-pupils. "I should have made a good naval officer," he says; but that is as it may be. The day came, in 1782, when he was ordered to Brest to take up his commission. It had not been made out, and he had to wait for it; and while he was waiting, something happened to cause him to change his mind. He had dined at mess and had heard ancient mariners talk of their travels and adventures. La Pérouse had been pointed out to him in the crowd. He had gazed in mute admiration at "this later Cook whose death is the secret of the tempests,"² and had lain awake all night "fighting imaginary battles and discovering unknown countries." But then he met Gesril again, and "it was written in the book of fate that this young man should exercise an absolute sway over my destiny."

1 Napoleon's rival, the victor of Hohenlinden. ↩

2 The fate of La Pérouse's last expedition remained unknown until the remains of it were discovered by Captain Dillon, in 1827, on the Isle of Vanikoro in Oceania. ↩

Which means, being interpreted, that Gesril told Chateaubriand that he was going home, and that Chateaubriand decided that he would like to go home,

No other explanation is even offered. " Seeing," he writes, "that Gesril was about to rejoin his parents, I reflected that there was nothing to hinder me from rejoining mine." And then-

" I should much have liked the naval service if the independence of my temper had not made service of every kind distasteful to me-for it is not in me to obey. The thought of travel attracted me; but I felt that I should only enjoy it if I travelled alone, wandering in accordance with my own will. And so, thus giving the first proof of my inconstancy, without saying a word to my uncle, without writing a line to my parents, without asking leave from any one, without waiting for the arrival of my commission, I set out one morning for Combourg, where I arrived like one fallen from the clouds."

«Voilà une belle équipée," grumbled his fatheran old man, too old for energetic anger; while his mother and his sister embraced the returning prodigal.

He had given up the navy, he told them, and proposed to take holy orders; "my real purpose," he explains, " was to gain time, for I did not know what I wanted;" and he was sent to resume his studies at the college of Dinan. Little is recorded of his stay there except that he had a narrow escape from being drowned while bathing in the Rance, and that his school-fellows nicknamed him " Francillon"; and he did not, apparently, remain there very long. His father, for reasons of economy, preferred to have him at home, and his mother acquiesced. He took longer and longer vacations until " by imperceptible degrees" he became " a fixture on the paternal hearth" in the gloomy chateau of Combourg.