We were drawn by eight horses decked out like mules in Spain, with bells hanging from their necks and attached to the reins, and housings and woollen fringes in various colours. While my mother sighed and my sisters talked without stopping, I looked and listened and marvelled at every turn of the wheels: this was the first journey of a Wandering Jew whose travels would never end. If a man only changed place, well and good … but his life and his heart change too.

Our horses were rested at a fishing village on the Cancale beach. Afterwards we crossed the marshes and the busy town of Dol: passing the door of the school to which I was soon to return, we turned inland.

For ten mortal miles we saw nothing but heaths ringed with woods, fallow land which had barely been cleared, fields of poor, short, black corn and scanty oats. We passed charcoal-burners leading strings of ponies with lank, tangled manes, and long-haired peasants in goatskin tunics driving gaunt oxen along with shrill cries or walking behind heavy ploughs, like fauns tilling the soil. Finally we came to a valley in which, close to a pond, there rose the spire of a village church; the towers of a feudal castle could be seen above the trees of a wood lit by the setting sun.

Coming to the foot of the hill, we forded a stream; another half-hour, and we left the highway to drive alongside a quincunx, down an avenue of trees whose tops mingled above our heads: I can still remember the moment when I entered this shade and the mixture of fear and joy which I experienced.

Leaving the darkness of the wood, we crossed a forecourt planted with walnut-trees, adjoining the steward’s house and garden, and passed through a gateway into a grassy courtyard known as the Green Court. On the right were long stables and a clump of chestnut-trees; on the left another clump of chestnut-trees. At the far end of the courtyard, which rose gradually, the château stood between two groups of trees. Its bleak, grim façade, topped by a machicolated covered gallery, linked two towers of disparate age, material, height, and thickness, which were surmounted by crenellations and a pointed roof, like a bonnet on top of a Gothic crown.

There were a few barred windows here and there in the bare expanse of wall. A wide, straight, rigid staircase of twenty-two steps, without banisters or parapet, had been built across the filled-in moat in place of the old drawbridge and led up to the door of the château in the centre of the façade. Over this door there could be seen the coat of arms of the Lords of Combourg and the slits through which the arms and chains of the drawbridge used to pass.

The coach drew up at the foot of the staircase; my father came forward to greet us. The reunion of his family momentarily softened his temper to such an extent that he was extremely pleasant to us. We went up the stairs and through an echoing entrance-hall with a Gothic ceiling into a little inner courtyard.

From this courtyard we went into the building which faced south over the pond and linked the two little towers. The whole château was in the form of a four-wheeled carriage. We found ourselves straight away in a room formerly known as the guardroom. There was a window at each end of this room, and two more at the sides. To make these four windows bigger, it had been necessary to pierce walls eight to ten feet thick. Two corridors which sloped like the corridor in the Great Pyramid led from the outer corners of the room to the little towers. A spiral staircase inside one of these towers connected the guardroom with the upper storey: such was the south building.

The building between the two big towers, looking north over the Green Court, consisted of a sort of dark, square dormitory which was used as a kitchen, the entrance-hall, the staircase, and a chapel. Over these rooms there was the drawing-room known as the Salon des Archives, or the Salon des Armoiries, or the Salon des Oiseaux, or the Salon des Chevaliers, so called on account of a ceiling studded with coloured coats of arms and painted birds. The recesses of the narrow, trefoiled windows were so deep that they formed little rooms with granite benches along the walls. Add to all this, in the various parts of the building, secret passages and staircases, dungeons and keeps, a maze of open and covered galleries, walled-up vaults; everywhere silence, darkness, and a face of stone: such was the Château of Combourg.

A supper which was served in the guardroom and which I ate greedily brought to an end the first happy day of my life. True happiness is not expensive; if it costs dear, then it is of an inferior nature.

I had scarcely awoken the next morning before I went to explore the grounds of the château and celebrate my new-found solitude. The staircase faced north-west. Sitting at the head of this staircase, you had before you the Green Court and, farther on, a kitchen garden lying between two groves of trees: one, on the right (the quincunx along which we had come the day before), was called the Little Mall, the other, on the left, the Great Mall; the latter was a wood of oaks, beeches, sycamores, elms, and chestnut-trees. Mme de Sévigné in her time spoke highly of the shade given by these old trees; since then, one hundred and forty years had been added to their beauty.

On the opposite side, to the south and east, the countryside presented a very different picture; from the windows of the great hall you could see the houses of Combourg, a pond, the causeway beside this pond which carried the highroad to Rennes, a water-mill, and a meadow covered with herds of cows and separated from the pond by the causeway. Alongside this meadow there stretched a hamlet appertaining to a priory founded in 1149 by Rivallon, Lord of Combourg, where you could see a mortuary statue of him recumbent in his knightly armour. From the pond, the land rose gradually, forming an amphitheatre of trees from which there projected the spires of village churches and the turrets of manor-houses. On the far horizon, between the west and the south, the heights of Bécherel were silhouetted against the sky. A terrace lined with great ornamental box-trees encircled the foot of the château on that side, passed behind the stables, and wound down to the garden adjoining the Great Mall.

My first stay at Combourg was of short duration.