The quincunx led into the cemetery: the Christian could not reach the church except by way of the burial ground: it is through death that one enters into the presence of God.

The monks were already in their stalls; the altar was lit by a multitude of tapers; lamps hung down from the various arches; in Gothic buildings there is so to speak a succession of perspectives and horizons. The beadles came to meet me ceremoniously at the door and led me into the choir. There three chairs had been put out: I took my place on the middle one; my wet-nurse sat on my left, my foster-brother on my right.

The Mass began: at the Offertory the priest turned towards me and read out certain prayers, after which my white clothes were removed and hung like an ex-voto below a picture of the Virgin. I was then dressed in a purple habit. The Prior delivered a discourse on the efficacy of religious vows; he recalled the story of the Baron de Chateaubriand who travelled to the East with St Louis; he told me that perhaps I too would one day go to Palestine and visit that Virgin of Nazareth to whom I owed my life through the intercession of the prayers of the poor, which always carried weight with God. After listening to the Benedictine’s exhortation, I always dreamt of the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and in the end I made it.

I have been dedicated to religion, and the garments of my innocence have rested on its altars; but it is not my clothes which should be hung now in its churches, it is my sufferings.

I was brought back to Saint-Malo. It is there, on the seashore between the Château and Fort Royal, that the children gathered together; it is there that I was brought up, a companion of the waves and the winds. One of the first pleasures I ever tasted was battling with the storms, and playing with the waves which retreated before me or chased after me on the shore. Another pastime was making monuments which my playmates called fours, or cakes, out of the sand on the beach. Since that time, I have often seen castles built to last for ever which have collapsed more quickly than my palaces of sand.

My fate having been irrevocably decided, I was abandoned to an idle childhood. A smattering of English, drawing, hydrography, and mathematics seemed more than sufficient for the education of a little boy destined in advance for the rough life of a sailor.

I grew up at home free of all control; we no longer lived in the house where I was born: my mother occupied a large house in the Place Saint-Vincent, almost opposite the gate leading to Le Sillon. The young urchins of the town had become my closest friends; I filled the courtyard and the staircases of the house with them; I resembled them in every respect; I spoke their language; I shared their manners and behaviour; I was dressed like them, unbuttoned and untidy like them; my shirts were in ribbons; I never had a pair of stockings that was not full of holes; I trailed around in old down-at-heel shoes, which came off with every step I took; I often lost my hat and sometimes my coat. My face was dirty, scratched, and bruised, my hands black. I looked so peculiar that my mother, in the midst of an angry outburst, could not help laughing and exclaiming: ‘How ugly he is!’

Shut up at night in their city under the same lock and key, the people of Saint-Malo formed a single family. Their manners were so innocent that young women who sent to Paris for ribbons and veils were regarded as worldly creatures whose scandalized companions would have nothing more to do with them. A marital misdemeanour was an unheard-of occurrence; when a certain Comtesse d’Abbeville was suspected of infidelity, a plaintive ballad was written on the subject which people sang while crossing themselves. However the poet, faithful in spite of himself to the traditions of the troubadours, sided against the husband, whom he called a monster and a barbarian.

On certain days of the year, the people of the town and the countryside came together at fairs called assemblies, which were held on the islands and in the forts around Saint-Malo; they went to these fairs on foot at low tide and in boats at high tide. The crowds of sailors and peasants; the covered wagons; the caravans of horses, donkeys, and mules; the competition between the stallkeepers; the tents pitched on the shore; the processions of monks and confraternities winding their way through the crowd with their banners and crosses; the rowing-boats and sailing-boats coming and going; the ships coming into the port or anchoring in the roads; the artillery salvoes, the ringing of bells; all this combined to lend these gatherings noise, movement, and variety.

I was the only witness to these fairs who did not share in the general merriment. I went to them without any money to buy toys or cakes. Shunning the contempt which follows in the wake of ill-fortune, I sat a long way from the crowd, beside the pools of water which the sea maintains and renews in the hollows of the rocks. There I amused myself watching the auks and gulls flying past, gazing into the bluish distance, picking up seashells, and listening to the music of the waves among the reefs. In the evening, at home, I was not much happier; I had an intense dislike for certain dishes, but I was forced to eat them. I used to look imploringly at La France, who would nimbly remove my plate when my father was looking the other way. The same strictness applied in the matter of warmth: I was not allowed to approach the fireplace. We have come a long way from the severe parents of that time to the fond parents of today.

On feast-days I used to be taken with my sisters on a pilgrimage to the various shrines of the city, to the chapel of Saint-Aaron and to the convent of La Victoire; the sweet voices of a few women hidden from sight fell upon my ear: the music of their canticles mingled with the roaring of the waves. When, in winter, at the hour of evening service, the cathedral filled with people; when old sailors on their knees and young women and children holding little candles read from their prayer-books; when the multitude, at the moment of benediction, recited in unison the Tantum ergo; when, in between these songs, the Christmastide squalls battered at the stained-glass windows of the basilica, shaking the roof of the nave which had once echoed with the lusty voices of Jacques Cartier and Duguay-Trouin, I experienced an extraordinary feeling of religion. I did not need La Villeneuve to tell me to fold my hands to call upon God by all the names my mother had taught me; I could see the heavens opening, the angels offering up our incense and our prayers; I bent my head: it was not yet burdened with those cares which weigh so heavily upon us that one is tempted never to raise one’s head again once one has bowed it before an altar.

One sailor, coming away from these services, would set sail fortified against the night, while another would come back into port using the illuminated dome of the church as a guide: thus religion and danger were always face to face, and their images presented themselves to my mind inextricably linked together. I had scarcely been born before I heard talk of death: in the evening, a man would go through the streets ringing a bell, to tell the Christians to pray for one of their deceased brethren. Almost every year, boats sank before my eyes, and while I was playing on the beach, the sea would deposit at my feet the corpses of foreign seamen who had died far from home. Mme de Chateaubriand used to say to me, as St Monica said to her son: Nihil longe est a Deo: ‘Nothing is far from God.’ My education had been entrusted to Providence: it did not spare me its lessons.

Dedicated to the Virgin, I came to know and love my protectress, whom I confused with my guardian angel: her picture, which had cost La Villeneuve a half-sou, was pinned to the wall above my bed.