He most certainly had genius: I have no doubt that in a high administrative or army post he would have shown extraordinary brilliance.

It was on his return from America that he decided to take a wife. Born on 23 September 1718, he married at thirty-five, on 3 July 1753, Apolline-Jeanne-Suzanne de Bedée, born on 7 April 1726, the daughter of M. Ange-Annibal, Comte de Bedée, Lord of La Bouëtardais. He established himself with her at Saint-Malo, which was some twenty miles from where both of them had been born, so that from their house they could see the skyline beneath which they had come into the world. My maternal grandmother, Marie-Anne de Ravenel du Boisteilleul, Mme de Bedée, born at Rennes on 16 October 1698, had received her schooling at Saint-Cyr during the last years of Mme de Maintenon: her education had been handed on to her daughters.

My mother, who was endowed by nature with considerable intelligence and a prodigious imagination, was brought up on Fénelon, Racine, and Mme de Sévigné, and fed with anecdotes about the court of Louis XIV; she knew the whole of Cyrus by heart. Apolline de Bedée had large features and was dark, dainty and ugly; her elegant manners and lively temperament contrasted with my father’s stiffness and equanimity. As fond of society as he was of solitude, and as high-spirited and cheerful as he was cold and unemotional, she did not have a single taste which was not at variance with those of her husband. The constraint to which she was submitted made a melancholy creature of a woman who had been gay and light-hearted. Obliged to keep silent when she would have liked to speak, she found consolation in a kind of noisy sadness broken by sighs which formed the only interruption to the mute sadness of my father. In matters of piety, my mother was an angel.

My mother gave birth at Saint-Malo to a boy who died in infancy and who was called Geoffroy, like nearly all the eldest sons of my family. This son was followed by another and by two daughters who lived only a few months.

These four children died of a rush of blood to the brain. Finally my mother brought into the world a third boy who was called Jean-Baptiste: it was he who later became the grandson-in-law of M. de Malesherbes. After Jean-Baptiste four daughters were born: Marie-Anne, Bénigne, Julie, and Lucile, all four of rare beauty, and of whom only the two eldest survived the storms of the Revolution. Beauty, that serious frivolity, remains when all the others have gone. I was the last of these ten children. It seems probable that my four sisters owed their existence to my father’s desire to see his name made secure by the arrival of a second boy; I tarried, having an aversion for life.

This is my baptismal certificate:

Extract from the archives of the registry office of the Commune of Saint-Malo for the year 1768.

François-René de Chateaubriand, son of René de Chateaubriand and of Pauline-Jeanne-Suzanne de Bedée, his wife, born on 4 September 1768, baptized the following day by ourselves, Pierre-Henri Nouail, Vicar-General to the Bishop of Saint-Malo. The godfather was Jean-Baptiste de Chateaubriand, his brother, and the godmother Françoise-Gertrude de Contades, who signs this register with the father. Signed: Contades de Plouër, Jean-Baptiste de Chateaubriand, Brignon de Chateaubriand, De Chateaubriand and Nouail, Vicar-General.

The house which my parents occupied at that time stands in a dark, narrow street in Saint-Malo called the Rue des Juifs; it has now been converted into an inn. The bedroom in which my mother was confined overlooks an empty stretch of the city walls, and from the windows of this room one can see the sea extending into the distance and breaking on the reefs. My godfather, as can be seen from my baptismal certificate, was my brother, and my godmother the Comtesse de Plouër, the daughter of the Maréchal de Contades. I was almost dead when I came into the world. The roar of the waves whipped up by a squall heralding the autumnal equinox drowned my cries: these details have often been recounted to me; the sadness of them has never left my memory. Not a day passes but, thinking of what I have been, I picture once more the rock on which I was born, the bedroom in which my mother inflicted life upon me, the storm which accompanied my first sleep, and the unhappy brother who gave me a name which I have nearly always dragged through misfortune. Heaven seemed to have gathered together these various circumstances in order to place in my cradle an image of my destiny.

Two

Childhood

I had scarcely left my mother’s womb when I suffered my first exile; I was relegated to Plancoët, a pretty little village situated between Dinan, Saint-Malo, and Lamballe. My mother’s only brother, the Comte de Bedée, had built the Château of Monchoix close to the village. My maternal grandmother’s property in this region stretched as far as the little town of Corseul, the Curiosolites of Caesar’s Commentaries. My grandmother, who had been a widow for a long time, lived with her sister, Mlle de Boisteilleul, in a hamlet separated from Plancoët by a bridge and called L’Abbaye, on account of a Benedictine abbey dedicated to Our Lady of Nazareth.

My wet-nurse turned out to be sterile; another poor Christian took me to her bosom. She dedicated me to the patroness of the hamlet, Our Lady of Nazareth, and promised her that I should wear white and blue in her honour until I reached the age of seven. I was only a few hours old, and the burden of time had already marked my brow.