François de Chateaubriand
Mémoires d’outre-tombe
Book I
Translated by A. S. Kline © 2005 All Rights Reserved.
This work may be freely reproduced, stored, and
transmitted, electronically or otherwise, for any non-commercial purpose.
Contents
Book
I: Chapter 2: Birth of my brothers and sisters - I arrive in the world.
Book
I: Chapter 5: Gesril – Hervine Magon – The fight with the two ship’s boys
Book
I: Chapter 7: Departure for Combourg – A description of the Château
La Vallée-aux-Loups, near Aulnay, this
BkI:Chap1:Sec1
It is four years now since, on my return from the
If ever the Bourbons return to the throne, I will ask as
recompense for my loyalty, only that they enrich me enough to join the edge of
the surrounding woods to my property: ambition possesses me; I would like to
extend my walks by a few acres: knight-errant though I am I have the sedentary
habits of a monk: since inhabiting this retreat, I don’t think I have set foot
outside my close three times. If my pines, firs, larches and cedars ever fulfil
their promise, the Vallée-aux-Loups will become a veritable charterhouse. When Voltaire was born at Châtenay, on
The place pleases me; since, for me,
it has replaced my ancestral fields; I have paid for it with the products of my
dreams and my waking hours; it is to the great wilderness of Atala that I owe the little wilderness
of Aulnay; and to create this refuge I have not, like the American settlers,
despoiled the Florida Indians. I am attached to my trees; I have addressed
elegies, sonnets, and odes to them. There is not one of them that I have not
tended with my own hands, that I have not rescued from root-beetles, from
caterpillars glued to its leaves; I know them all by name as if they were my
children: they are my family, I have no other, and I hope to die among them.
Here, I
wrote Les Martyrs, Les Abencerages,
L’Itinéraire and Moïse; what shall
I do now with these autumn evenings? This
Most of
my feelings remain buried deep in my heart, or have only been revealed in my
works as if applied to imaginary beings. Now that I miss my chimeras, without
pursuing them, I want to revive the inclinations of my best years: these Mémoires will be a mortuary temple
erected by the light of my memories.
My
father’s birth and the ordeals he endured in his early life, endowed him with
one of the most sombre characters there has ever been. This character
influenced my ideas by terrifying my childhood, saddening my youth, and
determining the nature of my upbringing.
I was
born a gentleman. As I see it, I have profited from this accident of the
cradle, maintaining that firm love of liberty that especially belongs to an
aristocracy whose last hour has struck. Aristocracy has three successive ages:
the age of superiority, the age of privilege, the age of vanity; leaving the
first behind it degenerates in the second and expires in the last.
Anyone
can enquire about my family, if the fancy takes them, in Moréri’s dictionary,
in the various histories of Brittany by D’Argentré, Dom Lobineau and Dom Morice, in the Histoire
généalogique du plusieurs maisons illustres de Bretagne by Père Dupaz, in Toussaint Saint-Luc, Le Borgne, and finally in
the Histoire des grands officiers de la
Couronne, by Père Anselme. (This genealogy is summarized in the Histoire généalogique et héraldique des
Pairs de France, des grands dignitaries de la Couronne, by Monsieur Le
Chevalier de Courcelles.)
The
proofs of my lineage were established by Chérin, for the
admission of my sister Lucile as a canoness
to the Chapter of L’Argentière, from which she was to pass to that of Remiremont; they were produced for my presentation to Louis XVI, again for my
affiliation to the Order of Malta, and again, for the last time, when my brother was
presented to that same unfortunate Louis XVI.
My name
was first written as Brien, then as Briant and Briand, through an invasion of French orthography. Guillaume le Breton gives it as Castrum-Briani.
There isn’t a name in
About
the beginning of the eleventh century the Briens gave their name to an important château in
The Chateaubriands split into three
branches from the very start: the first, known as the Barons de Chateaubriand, and the root-stock of the other two, originating in
the year 1000 in the person of Thiern, son of Brien, grandson of Alain III, Count or Leader of Brittany: the second, named the Seigneurs des Roches Baritaut, or Seigneurs
du Lion d’Angers; and the third going
under the name of the Sires de Beaufort.
When the line of the Sires de Beaufort
ended, in the person of Dame Renée, one Christophe II a collateral branch of this line held a share of land
at La Guérande en Morbihan. At this time, towards the middle of the seventeenth
century, there was widespread confusion in the ranks of the nobility, names and
titles having been usurped. Louis XIV ordered an enquiry, in order to re-establish
everyone’s rights. Christophe was maintained in possession, on proof of his descent
from ancient nobility, of his title, and his coat of arms, by order of the
Tribunal established at Rennes in order to re-validate the nobility of
‘Order of the Tribunal established by
the King (Louis XIV) for the re-establishment of the nobility in Brittany,
given 16th September 1669: Between the King’s Attorney-General and Monsieur
Christophe de Chateaubriand, Sieur de La Guérande: the which declares the
aforesaid Christophe to be of noble extraction, and permits him to adopt the
rank of Chevalier, and maintains his right to bear arms, of gules powdered with
golden fleurs-de-lys, to any number, and this after the production by him of
his authentic titles, of which there here appear, etc., etc., the aforesaid
order signed by Malescot.’
This
order confirms that Christophe de Chateaubriand de la Guérande was directly
descended from the Chateaubriands who were Sires de Beaufort: the Sires de Beaufort
being linked by historical documents to the first Barons de Chateaubriand. The
Chateaubriands of Villeneuve, Plessis and Combourg are cadet branches of the
Chateaubriands of La Guérande, as is shown by the descendants of Amaury, brother of Michel, which Michel was the brother of Christophe de La Guérande,
his lineage confirmed by this order of reformation of the nobility, given above
here, of
After
my presentation to Louis XVI, my brother thought to augment my fortune as a
younger son by providing me with some of those ecclesiastical benefits known as
bénéfices simples. There was only one
practical means of achieving this, since I was a layman and a soldier, which
was to enrol me in the Order of Malta. My brother sent my proofs to
The
President of the Chapter was Louis-Joseph des Escotais, Bailiff and
Grand Prior of Aquitaine, assisted by the Bailiff of Freslon, the Chevalier
de La Laurencie, the Chevalier de Murat, the Chevalier
de Lanjamet, the Chevalier de La Bourdonnay-Montluc, and the Chevalier du Bouëtiez. The request
was granted on the 9th, 10th and 11th of September 1789. It was said, in the
terms of admission of the Mémorial,
that I deserved the favour I was soliciting on
more than one ground, and that considerations of the greatest weight made
me worthy of the honour I requested.
And all
this took place after the taking of the Bastille, on the eve of
the scenes of
BkI:Chap1:Sec6
My brother’s eldest son (I am adding
this in 1831 to my original text written in 1811), Comte Louis de Chateaubriand,
had married Mademoiselle d’Orglandes,
by whom he had five daughters and a son, named Geoffroy. Christian, younger
brother of Louis, great-grandson and godchild of Monsieur de Malesherbes, and with a striking
resemblance to him, served with distinction in
By the division of the family
patrimony, Christian inherited the estate of Malesherbes, and Louis the estate
of Combourg. Christian not considering the equal division legitimate, wished,
in turning his back on the world, to relinquish the worldly goods that did not
belong to him and gave them to his elder brother.
In view of my lineage, it would be my affair
alone if I were to inherit my father’s and brother’s conceit in believing
myself a younger scion of the Dukes of Brittany, descended from Thiern, grandson of Alain III.
The aforesaid Chateaubriands have
twice mingled their blood with the blood of the English sovereigns, Geoffroy IV de Chateaubriand
having taken as his second wife Agnès de
Laval, grand-daughter of the Count of Anjou and Matilda, daughter of Henry I; Marguerite de Lusignan, widow of the English King, and
grand-daughter of Louis-le-Gros, was
married to Geoffroy V, twelfth
Baron de Chateaubriand. Regarding the Spanish royal race we find Brien, younger brother of the ninth Baron de
Chateaubriand, who was married to Jeanne,
daughter of Alphonse, King of
Aragon. Regarding the great families of
I would
never finish if I were to recount everything of which I have chosen to give
only a short summary: the note I intend to place at the end, out of
consideration for my two nephews, who are no doubt as well versed as I am in
these old woes, will replace what I omit in this text. However, these days, people
go a little too far; it has become common to declare that one is working class,
that one has the honour of being the son of a man of the soil. Are these boasts
as disinterested as they are philosophical? Are they not a way of siding with
the stronger party? The Marquesses, Counts and Barons of our day, possessing
neither land or privileges, three-quarters of them dying of hunger, denigrating
one another, refusing to recognise one another, challenging one another’s
titles; these nobles, whose own names are denied them, or who are only granted one
with reservations, can they inspire fear? However I wish to be pardoned for
having been obliged to descend to these puerile recitations, in order to
explain my father’s ruling passion, a passion which formed the crux of my
youthful drama. For my part, I neither glorify nor complain of the old social
order or the new. If, in the first, I was the Chevalier or Vicomte de
Chateaubriand, in the second I am François de Chateaubriand; I prefer my name
to my title.
My father
would readily, like a great medieval land-owner, have called God the Gentleman up there, and named Nicodemus (the Nicodemus
of the Gospels) a holy gentleman.
Now, passing by way of my begetter, we arrive at Christophe, sovereign lord of La Guérande, and descend in direct
line from the Barons of Chateaubriand to myself, Francois, vassal-less,
penniless Lord of the Vallée-aux-Loups.
Going
back through the lineage of the Chateaubriands, and its three branches, two of
the branches died out, while the third, that of the Sires de Beaufort, extended
by a branch (the Chateaubriands of La Guérande), grew poorer, an inevitable
consequence of the country’s laws: the elder sons appropriated two thirds of
the estate, according to Breton custom; the younger sons divided a mere third
of the paternal inheritance between them. The erosion of the latter’s meagre
inheritance occurred all the more rapidly through marriage; and as the same
distribution of two to one also applied to their offspring, the younger sons of
younger sons swiftly arrived at the division of a pigeon, a rabbit, a duck-pond
and a hunting dog, though they still remained noble knights and powerful lords of a dove-cote, a toad-hole, and a
rabbit-warren. In the old aristocratic families you find a quantity of younger
sons: tracing them through two or three generations, then they vanish,
descending little by little to the plough, or absorbed by the working classes,
without anyone knowing what has become of them.
The head of the family in name, and
arms, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, was Alexis de
Chateaubriand, Lord of La Guérande, the son of Michel, which
Michel had a brother Amaury.
Michel was the son of that Christophe,
confirmed in his lineage from the Sires de Beaufort
and Barons de Chateaubriand by the previously mentioned order. Alexis de la
Guérande was a widower; a confirmed drunkard, spending his days in drink,
living in disorder amongst his servants, and employing the noblest title-deeds
of his house to cover jars of butter.
Contemporary with this head of the
family in name and arms, there lived his cousin François, the son
of Amaury, younger brother of Michel. Francois, born on
To complete the misery, my grandmother
was thwarted in her plans by her sons’ characters: the eldest François-Henri,
on whom the magnificent estate of Villeneuve devolved, refused to marry and
became a priest; but instead of applying for the benefices his name could have
procured and with which he might have supported his brothers, he sought nothing,
out of pride and indifference. He buried himself in a country living and was
successively rector of Saint-Launeuc
and Merdrignac in the diocese of Saint-Malo. He had a passion for
poetry; I have seen a good number of his verses. The jovial character of this
sort of aristocratic Rabelais, the cult
of the Muses practised by this Christian
priest in a presbytery excited curiosity. He gave away all he owned and died
bankrupt.
The last of the four brothers Joseph
went to
My grandmother, worn out trying to
make something of her eldest and youngest sons, could do nothing for the other
two, René, my father,
and Pierre, my uncle.
This family which has ‘scattered gold’, according to its motto, could see from
its country seat the rich abbeys it had founded, and which enclosed its
ancestors. It had presided over the States of Brittany, being possessed of one
of the nine baronies; it had added its signature to the treaties between
sovereigns, served as surety for Clisson,
and still lacked the influence to obtain a second-lieutenant’s commission for
the heir to its name.
The one recourse left to the
poverty-stricken Breton nobility was the Royal Navy: they decided to take
advantage of it in my father’s case; but it meant him going to Brest, living there, paying his instructors,
buying his uniform, weapons, books, mathematical instruments: how to defray all
these expenses? The commission requested from the Minister for the Navy failed
to arrive, for want of a patron to solicit its despatch: the lady of Villeneuve fell ill with
grief.
Then my father showed the first sign
of that determined character that I later recognised in him. He was about
fifteen years old: becoming aware of his mother’s anxiety, he approached the
bed where she lay and said: I don’t wish to be a burden on you, any longer.’ At
this my grandmother began to cry (I’ve heard my father describe this scene a
score of times). ‘René,’ she replied, ‘what would you do? Cultivate your
field.’ ‘It can’t feed us all: let me go.’ ‘Ah well,’ said his mother, ‘go
then, wherever God wishes you to go.’ She embraced him, in tears. That very evening
my father quitted his mother’s farm and went to Dinan
where one of our relations gave him a letter of recommendation to a citizen of Saint-Malo. The orphan adventurer
was signed on as a volunteer, on an armed schooner, which set sail a few days
later.
The little
My
grandmother entrusted to her son René her son Pierre, Monsieur Chateaubriand du Plessis, whose son, Armand de Chateaubriand, was shot, on Bonaparte’s orders, on
Good Friday of 1809. He was one of the last French nobles to die for the
Monarchist cause. My father undertook to look after his brother, though he had
contracted, from habitual suffering, a rigidity of character which he retained
all his life; Virgil’s Non ignara
Monsieur
de Chateaubriand was tall and gaunt; he had an aquiline nose, thin pale lips,
and small deep-set eyes, sea-green or glaucous, like those of lions or barbarians
of old. I have never seen eyes like his: when anger filled them the glittering
pupils seemed to detach themselves and issue forth to strike you like bullets.
One
passion alone gripped my father, that of his name. His habitual state was a
profound sadness that age deepened, and a silence that he only emerged from to
vent his anger. Avaricious, in the hope of restoring his family to its former
glory, haughty with the nobles at the States of Brittany, harsh with his
vassals at Combourg, taciturn, despotic and menacing at home, seeing him
one felt fear. If he had lived to experience the Revolution, and if he had been
younger, he would have played an important part, or been massacred in his
château. He certainly possessed genius: I have no doubt that in charge of the
administration or the army he would have proved an extraordinary man.
It was on his return from
My mother,
endowed with plenty of spirit and a prodigious imagination, had been formed by
reading Fénelon, Racine, and Madame de Sévigné, and fed with
anecdotes of Louis XIV’s court; she knew the whole of Cyrus by heart. Apolline de Bedée, with large features, was
small, dark, and plain; the elegance of her manners and the liveliness of her
temperament contrasted with my father’s severity and calm. Loving society as
much as he loved solitude, as high-spirited and animated as he was cold and
unmoving, she had not a single taste that was not opposed to those of her
husband. The opposition she experienced made her melancholy, instead of happy
and light-hearted. Obliged to be silent when she would have wished to speak,
she compensated for it with a kind of noisy sadness broken by sighs, which
alone interrupted my father’s mute sadness. In piety, my mother was an angel.
La Vallée-aux-Loups,
My
mother gave birth at Saint-Malo to a son who died in infancy, and who was named Geoffroy, like nearly
all the eldest sons in my family. This son was followed by another and by two
daughters who lived only a few months.
These
four children died of a rush of blood to the brain. Finally, my mother brought
a third boy into the world, named Jean-Baptiste: it was he who later became the grandson-in-law of
Monsieur de Malesherbes. After Jean-Baptiste four daughters were born: Marie-Anne, Bénigne, Julie and Lucile, all four of
rare beauty: and of whom only the two eldest survived the storms of the
Revolution. Beauty that serious frivolity remains when all the rest have gone. I
was the last of these ten infants. It is probable that my four sisters owe
their existence to my father’s desire to see his name secured by the arrival of a
second boy; I tarried, I had an aversion for life.
Here is
my baptismal certificate:
‘Extract from the civil register of the Commune of Saint-Malo
for the year 1768.
François-René de Chateaubriand, son of René de Chateaubriand and
Pauline-Jeanne Suzanne de Bedée, his wife, born on
One
sees that I was mistaken in my writings: I set myself down as being born on the
4th October not the 4th September; my Christian names are
François-René, and not François-Auguste.
The
house my parents occupied at that time is situated in a dark, narrow street in
La Vallée-aux-Loups, January 1812.
Emerging
from my mother’s womb, I suffered my first exile; they relegated me
to Plancoët, a pretty village situated between Dinan, Saint-Malo and Lamballe. My mother’s
only brother, the Comte de Bedée, had built the
Château of Monchoix close to the village.
My maternal grandmother’s property in the region extended as far as the
little market town of Corseul, the Curiosolites
of Caesar’s Commentaries. My grandmother, long a widow, lived with her sister
Mademoiselle de Boisteilleul, in a hamlet separated from Plancoët by a bridge, and
called L’Abbaye, because of the Benedictine abbey, sacred to Our Lady of
Nazareth.
My wet nurse
was found to be sterile; another poor Christian took me to her breast. She
dedicated me to the patroness of the hamlet, Our Lady of Nazareth, and promised
her I would wear blue and white in her honour until I was seven. I was only a
few hours old, and the burden of time had already marked my brow. Why did they
not let me die? It entered into God’s counsels to answer the vow, made in
obscurity and innocence, with the preservation of a life which idle fame
threatened to extinguish.
That
vow, of the Breton peasant-woman, is no longer of our century: it was however a
touching thing, which a divine Mother’s intercession established between a
child and Heaven, sharing the concerns of the earthly mother.
After
three years I was taken back to Saint-Malo; it was already seven years since my father had regained the Combourg estate. He
wished to enter again into the possessions his ancestors had held; unable to
negotiate for the lordship of Beaufort, which had passed to the Goyon family, nor
the barony of Chateaubriand, which had fallen to the house of Condé, he turned his
gaze towards Combourg, which Froissart calls Combour: several branches of my family
had owned it through marriages with the Coëtquens. Combourg
defended
I was destined for the Royal Navy: disdain for the
court was natural to all Bretons, and particularly my father. The aristocracy of our States reinforced the
sentiment in him.
When I
was brought back to Saint-Malo, my father was at Combourg, my brother at the
All the
latter’s affections were concentrated on her eldest son; not that she failed to
cherish her other children, but she showed a blind preference to the young
Comte de Combourg. It is true that as a boy, as a late-comer, as the Chevalier
(so I was called), I had certain privileges compared to my sisters; but
ultimately I was left in the hands of servants. Moreover my mother, full of wit
and virtue, was preoccupied with the cares of society and the duties of
religion. The Comtesse de Plouër, my godmother,
was her intimate friend; she also knew Maupertuis’ parents, and those of the Abbé Trublet. She loved politics;
noise; the world: for one played politics at
The
first sentiments of my life arose from these characteristics of my parents. I
was attached to the woman who cared for me, an excellent creature called La Villeneuve, whose name I write with a feeling of gratitude and
tears in my eyes. La Villeneuve was a kind of superior nurse to the household,
carrying me in her arms, secretly giving me anything she could find, wiping
away my tears, kissing me, dropping me in a corner, picking me up again and
muttering all the time: ‘This one won’t be proud! He’s good-hearted! He’s not
hard on poor folk! Here, little fellow,’ and she would fill me with wine and
sugar.
My
childish affection for La Villeneuve was soon eclipsed by a worthier
friendship.