I should have lived in the days when people used to say to Mary: ‘Sweet Lady of Heaven and earth, mother of pity, fountain of all good, who bore Jesus Christ in your precious womb, most sweet and beautiful Lady, I thank and implore you.’

The first thing I ever learnt by heart was a sailor’s hymn to the Virgin which I have since heard being sung in a shipwreck. Even today I still repeat that paltry rhyme with as much pleasure as poetry by Homer; a Madonna wearing a Gothic crown and a blue silk dress with a silver fringe inspires greater devotion in me than a Raphael Virgin.

If only that peaceable Star of the Seas had been able to still the turmoil of my life! But I was to know no rest, not even in my childhood; like the Arab’s date-tree, my trunk had scarcely sprung from the rock before it was battered by the wind.

I have told how my precocious rebellion against Lucile’s mistresses laid the foundations of my evil reputation; a playmate completed it.

My uncle, M. de Chateaubriand du Plessis, who lived at Saint-Malo like his brother, had, again like him, four daughters and two sons. Of my two cousins, Pierre and Armand, who were my first companions, the former became one of the Queen’s pages and the latter was sent to school as being destined for the priesthood. Pierre, when he had served his time as a page, entered the Navy and was drowned off the coast of Africa. Armand, after being shut up in school for many years, left France in 1790, served throughout the Emigration, made a score of intrepid journeys in a longboat to the Brittany coast, and finally came and died for the King on the Grenelle Plain on Good Friday 1809, as I have already mentioned, and as I shall say once more when I come to recount his unhappy fate.

Deprived of the company of my two cousins, I replaced it with a new friendship.

The second floor of the house where we lived was occupied by a gentleman called Gesril who had a son and two daughters. This son had been brought up differently from myself; he was thoroughly spoilt and everything he did was a subject for admiration: he liked nothing better than fighting, unless it was provoking a quarrel of which he would appoint himself arbitrator. He was always playing tricks on the maids he met taking children out for a walk, and his pranks, magnified into dreadful crimes, were the talk of the town. His father laughed at everything he did, and the naughtier Joson was, the more he was loved. Gesril became my great friend and gained an unbelievable ascendancy over me: I learnt from this master, although my character was the exact opposite of his. I loved playing by myself and never tried to pick a quarrel with anybody: Gesril loved games and noise and gloried in childish squabbles. When some street-urchin spoke to me, Gesril would ask me: ‘Why do you put up with him?’ At this I imagined that my honour was compromised and I would fly at the impudent youth, however big or however old he might be. My friend would watch the fight and applaud my courage, but never lifted a finger to help me. Sometimes he raised an army from all the boys he met, dividing his conscripts into two gangs, and we would skirmish on the beach with stones as weapons.

This tendency to push others into adventures of which he remained a spectator might lead one to imagine that Gesril did not show much courage in later life; yet it was he who, on a smaller stage, probably surpassed Regulus in heroism; only Rome and Livy were wanting to ensure his fame. He had become a naval officer and was taken prisoner in the Quiberon landing,* when the action was over and the English went on cannonading the Republican army, Gesril plunged into the sea, swam out to the ships lying offshore, and told the English to cease fire, explaining that the émigrés had surrendered. They wanted to save him, throwing him a rope and urging him to climb on board. ‘I am a prisoner on parole,’ he shouted from the water, and he swam back to land: he was shot with Sombreuil and his companions.

Gesril was my first friend; both of us misjudged in our childhood, we were drawn together by the instinct of what we might become one day.

Two adventures brought this first part of my story to an end and produced a notable change in the manner of my upbringing.

We were on the beach one Sunday, along Le Sillon beyond the Porte Saint-Thomas, where thick stakes had been driven into the sand to protect the walls against the sea. We were in the habit of climbing on to these stakes to watch the first waves of the incoming tide pass beneath us. The places were taken as usual; there were several little girls among the little boys. Of the latter, I was the farthest out to sea, having nobody in front of me but a pretty little thing called Hervine Magon, who was laughing with pleasure and crying with fright. Gesril was at the other end of the row of stakes, nearest the shore.

The tide was coming in, the wind rising; already the maids and valets were calling out: ‘Come down, Mademoiselle! Come down, Monsieur!’ Gesril waited for a big wave to arrive; when it swept in between the piles, he pushed the child sitting next to him; the boy fell on to another, and he on to the next: the whole line went over like a row of skittles, but each one was steadied by his neighbour; there was only the little girl at the end of the line on to whom I collapsed who, having nobody to support her, fell into the water. The ebb swept her off her feet; there was a chorus of shrieks, and all the maids hitched up their skirts and waded into the sea, each one seizing her charge and boxing its ears. Hervine was rescued, and declared that François had pushed her over. The maids bore down upon me; I got away from them and ran home to barricade myself in the cellar, with the female army hot in pursuit. Fortunately my mother and father were out. La Villeneuve defended the door valiantly and cuffed the enemy vanguard. The real cause of the trouble, Gesril, came to my help: he went up to his room and with his two sisters threw jugfuls of water and baked apples at the attacking force. They raised the siege at nightfall, but the news spread through the town, and the Chevalier de Chateaubriand, aged nine, passed for an evil character, a descendant of those pirates of whom St Aaron had purged his rock.

This is the other adventure:

I was going one day with Gesril to Saint-Servan, a suburb separated from Saint-Malo by the trading port. To get there at low tide, you cross the water-courses on narrow bridges of flat stones which are covered when the tide comes in. The servants accompanying us had been left a long way behind.