The eldest, François-Henri, who had inherited the magnificent estate of La Villeneuve, refused to marry and became a priest; but instead of applying for the benefices which his name could have obtained for him, he asked for nothing out of pride or indifference. He buried himself in a country living and was successively rector of Saint-Launeuc and of Merdrignac, in the diocese of Saint-Malo. He had a passion for poetry; I have seen a fair amount of his verse. The jovial character of this sort of aristocratic Rabelais and the cult of the Muses which this Christian priest practised in a presbytery excited people’s curiosity. He gave away all that he possessed and died insolvent.

The last of the four sons, Joseph, went to Paris and shut himself up in a library: every year he was sent the 416 francs which were his portion as a younger son. He went unnoticed in the world of books; he devoted himself to historical research. During his lifetime, which was brief, he wrote every New Year’s Day to his mother, the only sign of life he ever gave. What a strange fate! There were my two uncles, the one a scholar and the other a poet; my elder brother wrote quite pleasant verse; one of my sisters, Mme de Farcy, had a real gift for poetry; another sister of mine, the Comtesse Lucile, a canoness, deserves to be remembered for a few admirable pages; I myself have covered a great deal of paper. My brother died on the scaffold; my two sisters departed from a life of suffering after languishing in prison; my two uncles did not leave enough to pay for the four planks of their coffin; while literature has caused me joy and anguish, and, with God’s help, I can still look forward to dying in the workhouse.

My grandmother, after wearing herself out trying to make something out of her eldest and youngest sons, could do nothing for the other two, René, my father, and Pierre, my uncle. This family, which had scattered gold, in accordance with its motto, could see from its country seat the rich abbeys which it had founded and which contained the remains of its forebears. It had presided over the States of Brittany, as possessing one of the nine baronies; it had given its signature to a treaty between sovereigns and served as surety for Clisson, yet it had not enough influence to obtain a second-lieutenant’s commission for the heir to its name.

There remained one course open to the poverty-stricken aristocracy of Brittany: the Royal Navy. The family decided to adopt it in the case of my father, but first of all he would have to go to Brest, live there, pay his instructors, buy his uniform, his arms, his books, and his mathematical instruments: how was he to meet these expenses? The commission for which the Minister for the Navy had been petitioned failed to arrive, for want of a protector to demand its despatch: the lady of the manor of Villeneuve fell ill with grief.

It was then that my father showed the first sign of that determined character of which I later had personal experience. He was about fifteen years old: becoming aware of his mother’s anxiety, he went up to the bed where she was lying and said to her:

‘I do not wish to be a burden upon you any longer.’

At this, my grandmother started to cry (I have heard my father describe this scene to me a score of times).

‘René,’ she replied, ‘what do you want to do? You must till your field.’

‘It cannot provide us all with food; let me go.’

She kissed the boy, sobbing bitterly. That very evening, my father left his mother’s farm and went to Dinan, where one of our relations gave him a letter of recommendation for 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 republic of Saint-Malo was at that time alone in upholding the honour of the French flag on the high seas. The schooner joined the fleet which Cardinal Fleury was sending to help Stanislas, besieged in Danzig by the Russians. My father stepped ashore and found himself involved in the memorable battle which fifteen hundred Frenchmen, led by the valiant Breton De Bréhan, Comte de Plélo, waged on 29 May 1734 against forty thousand Muscovites under the command of Munich. De Bréhan, diplomat, warrior and poet, was killed and my father twice wounded. He returned to France and signed on again. Shipwrecked on the Spanish coast, he was attacked and stripped of all he possessed by robbers in Galicia; he worked his passage on a boat to Bayonne and appeared once more at home. His courage and his methodical nature had won him a certain reputation. He went over to the West Indies, made money in the colonies, and laid the foundations of a new fortune for his family.

My grandmother entrusted to her son René her son Pierre, M. de Chateaubriand du Plessis, whose son, Armand de Chateaubriand, was shot on Bonaparte’s orders on Good Friday of the year 1809. He was one of the last French nobles to die for the monarchy. My father undertook to look after his brother, although he had contracted, from the habit of suffering, a certain rigidity of character which he kept all his life; the idea that suffering teaches kindness – Virgil’s Non ignara mali – is not always true: unhappiness can engender hardness as well as tenderness.

M. de Chateaubriand was a tall, gaunt figure; he had a Roman nose, thin, pale lips, and small, deep-set eyes which were sea-green or blue-grey, like the eyes of lions or barbarians of old. I have never seen eyes like his: when anger entered into them, the gleaming pupils seemed to detach themselves and strike one like bullets.

My father was dominated by a single passion, that of his name. His habitual condition was a profound melancholy which old age increased and a silence from which he emerged only to give vent to violent outbursts of anger. Miserly in the hope of restoring its original splendour to his family, haughty with his fellow nobles at the States of Brittany, autocratic with his vassals at Combourg, silent, despotic, and menacing at home, the very sight of him inspired fear. If he had lived to see the Revolution, and if he had been younger, he would have played an important part in history or he would have died in the defence of his château.