Chapitre II. Early years at Combourg-His sister Lucile-Love's young dream

Chateaubriand refuses to take Orders-A commission in the army obtained for him.

WE find a vivid mention of Combourg and its chateau in Arthur Young's Travels in France- "To Combourg the country has a savage aspect; husbandry not much further advanced, at least in skill, than among the Hurons, which appears incredible amidst inclosures; the people almost as wild as their country, and their town of Combourg one of the most brutal, filthy places that can be seen; mud houses, no windows, and a pavement so broken as to impede all passengers, but ease none-yet here is a chateau and inhabited; who is this Mons. de Chateaubriant, the owner, that has nerves strung for a residence amidst such filth and poverty?"

That was in 1788, when M. de Chateaubriand, the elder, was dead, and the old order was at last on the verge of giving way to the new. The description in the Mémoires d'Outre-tombe belongs to a slightly earlier date, when the imminent fall of feudalism was only foreseen by the discerning-whose number included no member of the house of Chateaubriand, and few, if any, of the Breton aristocrats. To them -to the younger as well as to the older of them-it still seemed a matter of course that things would always be as they had always been.

The eldest son was in Paris, pushing his fortune as a soldier. The three elder daughters were married: Marie to M. de Marigny, Bénigne to M. de Québriac, Julie to M. de Farcy. There remained at Combourg only M. and Madame de Chateaubriand, Lucile and René, waited upon by a cook and a housemaid, two footmen and a coachman; and their home was a dilapidated feudal castle, cold and gloomy, like a prison, and so large that "a hundred knights with their dames, their esquires, their serving men, their horses, and their hounds" might almost have been lost and unobserved there.

They lived a lonely, constrained, and inharmonious life. Few visitors came, and only at long intervals. They were ceremoniously entertained for a night, and then rode on to take part in the proceedings of the Breton Parlement at Rennes. For the rest, the family lived alone, without distractions, without any common bond of sympathy, chilled by the self-contained, selfcentred silence of its head.

All M. de Chateaubriand's interest in life, it would seem, had been used up in the great task of restoring the fallen fortunes of his house. When that was done, he had nothing left to live for. Wrapped up in his family pride, he was warmed by no family affections. He had not loved his wife when he married her, and it was too late for him to begin to love her now; she and his children were afraid of him. He had his own apartment in a distant corner of the castle; and he sat there for hours, contemplating the emblazoned family

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tree that faced him on the wall. He was a nobleman, and now, at last, having retired from commerce, he was living as a nobleman should. That was his fixed idea-all that he knew or cared about. To that end, he worked-or professed to work-in his study, and made a grave daily inspection of his vegetable garden, and went out, as gravely, and always alone, to fish or shoot on his estate, while his wife prayed, or cried, in the private chapel. She and the children scarcely saw him except at meal-times; and his dreaded daily appearance at the supper-table, in the great hall, is the theme of one of his son's most graphic passages :- "Supper over, we moved from the table to the chimney corner, and my mother threw herself, with a sigh of relief, on an old sofa of worn-out Siamese cotton. A small table, with a candle on it, was placed beside her. I sat close to the fire with Lucile, and the servants cleared the table and left the room. My father began to pace the room, his walk never ceasing until his bedtime. He wore a ratteen dressing-gown -or rather a kind of cloak which I have never seen worn by anybody else. His head, half bald, was covered with a large white cap which stood up stiffly. The huge hall was so dimly lighted by its single candle, that we could no longer see him when he got to any distance from the hearth, but could only hear his footsteps as he still walked in the dark. Then he returned slowly in the direction of the light, and gradually emerged from the darkness like a spectre, in his white wrapper and his white cap, with his pallid and elongated face. Lucile and I exchanged a few words in whispers when he was at the further end of the hall, but relapsed into silence as he drew near again. "What are you talking about?" he asked us as he passed. Stricken with terror, we made no reply, and he walked on again; and, for the rest of the evening, no sound fell upon our ears except his measured tramp, and my mother's sighs, and the howling of the wind outside.

"The castle clock struck ten, and then my father stopped. The same spring which had lifted the hammer of the clock seemed to have arrested his steps. He pulled out his watch and wound it up, picked up a large silver candlestick with a large candle in it ... and went on his way to his bedroom. Lucile and I waited for him on his way thither, and kissed him and wished him good-night. He bent his withered, hollow cheek towards us, without a word, continued on his way, and withdrew to the depths of the tower, where we heard the doors slam behind him.

" And then the spell was broken. My mother, my sister, and 1, transformed into statues by my father's presence, recovered the functions of life »

Speech flowed again, in fact, and the three told each other ghost stories-for the castle itself was said to be haunted by a ghost with a wooden leg-with the result that when the time came for Chateaubriand to escort his mother and sister to their chambers, they always required him to look up the chimneys and under the beds as a precaution against the peril of supernatural apparitions.

Except, indeed, for this unavailing nightly search for ghosts, Chateaubriand's life was, for two years or so, almost empty of incident. He sat in his room and read; he rambled in the woods and fields; he exchanged confidences with Lucile; and that was aller very nearly so. The rest, we must hope and believe, is calumny, though it is not a calumny that can be passed over quite in silence.

The theme of René, it will be remembered, is a brother's guilty passion for a sister; and René has been read, by some of its readers, as Chateaubriand's own confession of an abnormal and unnatural desire. Decidedly it is no one's fault but his that that interpretation has been put upon the work. He drew himself as René, and he drew Lucile as Amélie ; and he dragged the criminal idea into a tale to the central sentiment of which it was not necessary. He handed his enemies, that is to say, the weapon which they employed against him; and one can only answer that his accusers should have been disarmed by the very openness with which he did so.

Not, of course, that one ventures to pretend to know what morbid thoughts stirred, or did not stir, in the mind of a strange and solitary youth, circumstanced as he was and just awaking to the mysterious consciousness of adolescence. Very likely those thoughts were not all altogether healthy. But the guilt of which he wrote was, so to say, "in the air" at the time when he was writing. We find it reflected in other writers-in Shelley, for example; and there are also true stories of the period in which it figures, tricked out almost as romance. A brother of the beautiful Madame Tallien-Notre Dame de Thermidor-killed himself, in the days of the Revolution, because he had loved his sister in vain. The story is told in the Memoirs of the Duchesse d'Abrantés. Chateaubriand may have heard it, and made literary use of it. One would rather think that than take a view dishonouring to his memory-or even a view dishonouring only to the memory of Lucile.

She was a wild, wayward creature, with streaks of genius, but hardly sane. She was to have her own sad story, of which more shall be said when the proper time arrives; and it is only because of the many indications of insanity that we find in it that the suggestion referred to has any shade of plausibility. Chateaubriand, on his side, we may be sure, drew only literary inspiration from her. " You should describe it," she said to him, when he raved to her of the ravishing joys of solitude; and he who was to become a master of French prose began by writing poetry. Not from Lucile, but from a neighbour's wife, came the first temptation-the dawning perception of the truth to be realized so vividly in the years to come, that it was not good for man to live alone.

It was at one of the windows of the chateau. They had all run to look out of it upon some spectacle in the village street. The boy and the woman were squeezed against each other in the crush. " I knew no more," he writes; "but from that moment I realized that to love and to be loved after a fashion hitherto unknown to me was the crowning felicity of life."

" Another man,' he proceeds, " would soon have come to know the pains and pleasures of the passion of which the germ was in my heart." But he did not. He dreamed instead, consumed with love for an imaginary and ideal woman, on whom he bestowed all the charms of all the beautiful women whom he had ever seen or read of- " She had the figure, the hair, and the smile of the stranger who had pressed me to her bosom. I gave her the bright eyes of one young maiden in the village, and the fresh complexion of another. The portraits, hanging in our drawing-room, of the great ladies of the courts of François I, Henri IV, and Louis XTV, suggested other traits; and I stole charms even from the pictures of the Virgin in the churches.

« This invisible charmer attended me in all my walks. I conversed with her as with a real human being, and she varied with the variations of my moods. She was Aphrodite unveiled, Diana clad in azure and dew, Thalia with the smiling mask, or Hebe carrying the drinking-cup of youth. Often she became a fairy, brought to me as nature's gift. I added touches to my picture without ceasing, painting out one charm only to paint in another; and I also altered the jewels that bedecked her, borrowing adornments from all countries, all ages, all arts and all religions... Pygmalion was less in love with his statue than j was with her. . .

And so forth; Chateaubriand's first court of women being a court conjured up by his own extravagant imagination. " I fancy, he adds, " that the thing is without parallel in the history of the human heart;" but that is the inevitable touch of egoism. For surely

surely—

He lived in these dreams, he tells us, for two years,

enamoured of solitude and silence. He climbed to the top of the castle towers, and stood there " like Ismen on the ramparts of Jerusalem, invoking the thunder and hoping that it would bring me Armida." Or he wandered in lonely places with his imaginary mistress, picturing himself crossing the seas with her, visiting the ruins of "Venice, Rome, Athens, Jerusalem, Memphis, and Carthage," or " demanding happiness from the palm-groves of Otahiti," or lying to rest on the banks of the Ganges "where the Bengali, leaning against the mast of his bamboo skiff, chanted his Indian barcarolle." Or else he had moods of despair, convinced that his dreams were only dreams to which no reality corresponded; and, in such moods, he thought of suicide. And the outcome of it all was that he fell ill, and was nursed back to life, and confessed that he did not feel called to the celibate ecclesiastical estate.

Assuredly he was not called to it. Perhaps no really great man ever is, for the greatest Churchmen, in France at all events, have not been the most faithful to their vows. Looking back on the decision in after years, he had no illusions on that score.

" On all the more momentous occasions of my life," he writes, "I have always quickly perceived what was the course that I must avoid. My sense of honour has always pushed me in the way that I should go. I saw that as an abbé I should be simply ridiculous. The sacerdotal dignity of a bishop did indeed impress me, and it was with respect that I recoiled before the altar. Should 1, as a bishop, I asked myself, make strenuous efforts to acquire virtue, or should I be satisfied with the concealment of my vices? I am too weak for the former, too open and candid for the latter, course."

So it was settled. Chateaubriand had refused to be a sailor, and now he refused to be a priest. The only other profession open to a man of his rank was the army. He dreamed, indeed, he says, of "going to Canada to clear the forests," or of enlisting in the service of some Oriental potentate; but his father awoke one day to energy and decision, and summoned his son to his presence.

"Chevalier," he said to him, "there must be an end of all this nonsense. Your brother has obtained you a commission as sub-lieutenant in the regiment of Navarre. You will start for Rennes, and thence you will go to Cambrai. Here are one hundred louis. Be careful how you spend them. I am an old man, and ill, and I have not long to live. Conduct yourself as a man of honour, and do nothing to disgrace your name »