He said to me one evening: ‘Get your hat: I am taking you to the theatre.’ I lost my head and went straight to the cellar to look for my hat which was in the attic. A company of strolling players had just arrived. I had already seen puppet-shows, and I imagined that in a theatre you saw marionettes far superior to those in the street.

My heart beating wildly, I came to a wooden building in a deserted street, and went along some dark corridors, not without a certain feeling of apprehension. A little door was opened, and there I was with my brother in a box half-full of people.

The curtain had risen, the play begun: it was Diderot’s Le Père de famille. I saw two men walking up and down the stage and talking to each other, with everybody looking at them. I took them for the managers of the puppet-show who were chatting outside the home of the Old Woman who lived in a shoe, while they waited for the audience to arrive; the only thing that surprised me was that they should discuss their business so loudly and that they should be listened to in silence. My astonishment grew when other characters coming on to the stage started waving their arms about and weeping, and everybody took to crying out of sympathy. The curtain fell without my having understood a word of all this. My brother went down to the foyer during the interval between the two plays. Left in the box among strangers whose company was a torment to me in my shyness, I would have liked nothing better than to be back at school. Such was the first impression I obtained of the art of Sophocles and Molière.

The third year of my life at Dol was marked by the wedding of my two eldest sisters: Marie-Anne married the Comte de Marigny and Bénigne the Comte de Québriac. They accompanied their husbands to Fougères, giving as it were the signal for the dispersal of a family whose members were soon to separate. My sisters received the nuptial blessing at Combourg on the same day, at the same time, at the same altar, in the château chapel. They wept and my mother wept; I was surprised at their sorrow: I understand it today. I never attend a christening or a wedding without smiling bitterly or experiencing a pang. After being born, I know no greater misfortune than that of giving birth to a human being.

That same year saw a revolution in my person as in my family. Chance put into my hands two very different books, an unexpurgated Horace and a history of Bad Confessions. The spiritual upheaval which these two books brought about in me is unbelievable: a new world came into being around me. On the one hand, I obtained insight into secrets incomprehensible to one of my age, an existence different from mine, and charms of an unknown nature in a sex in which I had seen only a mother and sisters; on the other hand, ghosts dragging chains behind them and vomiting fire spoke to me of eternal punishment for a single hidden sin. I began to lose sleep; at night I thought I could see black hands passing in turn across my curtains: I came to imagine that these hands were cursed by religion, and this idea added to my terror of the infernal shades. I searched in vain in heaven and in hell for the explanation of a double mystery. Affected both morally and physically, I continued in my innocence to fight against the storms of a premature passion and the terrors of superstition.

If, since that time, I have been able to depict with some degree of verisimilitude the movements of the heart mingled with Christian remorse, I am convinced that I owe this achievement to the chance which introduced me at the same time to two inimical empires. The havoc which an evil book wrought in my imagination was compensated for by the terror which another book inspired in me, and this in turn was so to speak modified by the pleasurable thoughts which certain unveiled pictures had left with me.

The holidays in the course of which I entered upon my twelfth year were sad ones; the Abbé Leprince accompanied me to Combourg. I never went out except with my tutor; we went for long walks together. He was dying of consumption; he was silent and melancholy; I was scarcely any merrier. We walked for hours without saying a word. One day we lost our way in the woods; M. Leprince turned to me and asked:

‘Which way shall we go?’

I replied without hesitation:

‘The sun is setting; just now it is striking the window of the great tower; let us go that way.’

That evening M. Leprince recounted this incident to my father: the future traveller showed himself in my decision. Many a time, seeing the sun go down in the forests of America, I have remembered the woods of Combourg; my memories echo one another.

The Abbé Leprince suggested that I should be given a horse; but in my father’s opinion, the only thing a naval officer need know how to handle was a ship.