I had scarcely left my mother's womb when i suffered my first exile - reading Chateaubriand's Memoirs

On certain days of the year, the people of the town and the countryside came together at fairs called assemblies, which were held on the islands and in the forts around Saint-Malo; they went to these fairs on foot at low tide and in boats at high tide. The crowds of sailors and peasants; the covered wagons; the caravans of horses, donkeys and mules; the competition between the stall keepers; the tents pitched on the shore; the processions of monks and confraternities winding their way through the crowd with their banners and crosses, the rowing-boats and sailing-boats coming and going; the ships coming into port or anchoring in the roads; the artillery salvoes, the ringing of bells, all this combined to lend these gatherings noise, movement and variety.

I was the only witness to these fairs who did not share in the general merriment. I went to them without any money to buy toys or cakes. Shunning the contempt which follows in the wake of ill-fortune, I sat a long way from the crowd, beside the pools of water which the sea maintains and renews in the hollows of the rocks. There I amused myself watching the auks and gulls flying past, gazing into the bluish distance, picking up seashells and listening to the music of the waves among the reefs.

Those fairs are so vividly and affectionately described, and present a wonderful picture of festivity in the spaces between land and water, that it's almost a surprise to find him removed so far from it. It might almost be comical, but it completely avoids self pity, because the picture of childhood solitude is somehow larger, greater, the acquiring of experiences, of solitude in the vastness of nature.

The two worlds, social and solitary, evenly weighted and combined really hit me when I read this passage.

Lovely, thanks. Come to think of it, if the rest of the book slips quietly away, it may come back refreshed.

C falls in with a real spoiled prick called Gesril. The sort of childhood friend who gets you into scrapes and then stands back and somehow avoids blame. For a mixture of reasons the young Chateaubriand had earned himself a bad reputation, through always defending his older sister Lucile, the youngest of the sisters, through hanging round with street urchins all the time and being similarly ragged, and through his friendship with Gesril. He narrates a few 'adventures' - this one is particularly picturesque.

We were on the beach one Sunday, along 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, 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 [a lady-in-waiting in the household of whom C was v fond] 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. Their 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.

("Saint Aaron of Aleth (died after 552), was also called Saint Aihran or Eran in Breton, a sixth-century hermit, monk and abbot at a monastery on Cézembre, a small island near Aleth, opposite Saint-Malo in Brittany, France.")

Monarchy and Revolution 1768-1800: Youth

But what is most to be admired in Brittany is the moon rising over the land and setting over the sea.

Appointed by God as governess of the abyss, the moon, like the sun, has her clouds, her mists, her rays and her projected shadows; and like the sun, she does not retire alone; a procession of stars accompanies her. As, on my native shore, she descends towards the limit of the sky, she intensifies her silence which she communicates to the sea; soon she falls to the horizon, intersects it, and before long shows only half her brow which sinks, bows and disappears in the gently swelling waters. The queen's attendant stars, before following in her wake, seem to pause, suspended on the crest of the waves. The moon has no sooner set than a breeze coming from the open sea breaks the image of the constellations, just as the torches are extinguished after a solemn ceremony.

I have never quite understood the meteorological phenomenon of that first breath of dawn, that light exhalation of the air, that is the true signal that day has started, but have experienced it several times. (of course the moon setting does not always indicate dawn, but here it clearly does as it comes with the extinguishing of the stars). in my head it's something like a ripple passing across the earth just before the sun rises, something like an atmospheric version of the Severn Bore.

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 o a feudal castle could be seen above the trees of a wood lit by the setting sun.

I was obliged to pause for a moment just now: my heart was beating so hard as to push away the table on which I am writing. The memories awakening in my mind are overwhelming in their number and poignancy; and yet, what do they mean to the rest of the world?

astonishing passage. for many pages you've been totally immersed in C's childhood, hypnotically so, and the landscape through which he's been travelling. Then suddenly the past telescopes away and you are brought back to C writing now, heart hammering at the immediacy of it all, thrusting away the table with the urgency of it.

he has been talking about how excellent his verbal memory is, and refers cryptically to 'another sort of memory' of which he'll speak later on.

One thing humiliates me: a good memory is often the quality of stupidity; it generally belongs to ponderous minds, which it makes heavier on account of the additional baggage with which it loads them. And yet, where should we be without memory? We should forget our friendships, our loves, our pleasures, our work; the genius would be unable to collect his thoughts; the most ardent lover would lose his tenderness if he could remember nothing; our existence would be reduced to the successive moments of a perpetually fading present; there would no longer be any pas. Poor creatures that we are, our life is so vain that it is nothing but a reflexion of our memory.

Would my mind have been better developed if I had been sent to school earlier? I doubt it: these waves, these winds, this solitude which were my first masters were probably better suited to my native dispositions; perhaps I have these wild teachers to thank for certain qualities I would otherwise lack.

and now I am caught up to my place in the book - i'll add stuff to the thread as i come across it.

oh, i meant to include his subsequent comments on that small group of people around his grandmother mentioned above, mainly because of the last line.

I am perhaps the only man in the world who knows that these people existed. A score of times since then I have made the same remark; a score of times societies have formed and dissolved around me. This impossibility of length and duration in human relationships, this profound oblivion which follows us, this invincible silence which takes possession of our graves and spreads to our houses, brings me back time and time again to the need for isolation. Any hand will do to give us the glass of water we may need in the fever of death. But it should not be too dear to us, for how can one abandon without despair a hand which one has covered with kisses and which one would like to keep forever close to one's heart?

i think the posts above give a pretty good idea of Chateaubriand is like - sceptical towards his life, solitary with the capability of observing and affection for society that solitariness can sometimes imply. A man constituted of the wind, sea and rock of his native Saint-Malo and Brittany. A wayward scamp as a child. One thing it doesn't capture is his piety, which his mother gave to him.

On the feast-days I have just mentioned I used to be taken with my sisters on a pilgrimage to the various shrines of the city, to the chapel of Saint-Aaron and to the convent of La Victoria; the sweet voices of a few women hidden from sight fell upon my ear: the must of their canticles mingled with the roaring of the waves. When, in winter, at the hour of evening service, the cathedral filled with people; when old sailors on their knees and young women and children holding little candles read from their prayer-books; when the multitude, at the moment of benediction, recited in unison the Tantum Ergo; when, in between these songs, the Christmastide squalls battered at the stained-glass windows of the basilica, shaking the roof of the nave which had once echoed with the lusty voices of Jacques Cartier and Duguay-Trouin, I experienced an extraordinary feeling of religion. I did not need La Villeneuve to tell me to fold my hands to call upon God by all the names my mother had taught me; I could see the heavens opening, the angels offering up our incense and our prayers; I bent my head: it was not yet burdened wit those cares which weigh so heavily upon us that one is tempted never to raise one's head again once one has bowed it before an alter.

I'm also semi-wishing I'd called this thread 'I'm into CB'.

'that one is tempted never to raise one's head again once one has bowed it from an altar'

partly to correct the typo, partly to emphasise the phrase, which very effectively conveys to me the notion of piety - what is lifelong devotion to god, such that you might become a monk or whatever, other than a recognition of ones great sins and cares, such that you feel you can never again raise your head?

It seems to me, thank xt, that, despite his piety, Chateaubriand is one who always raised his head.

Wonder what he thought of the Goncourts?
"Visiting the enormous new Eldorado café-concert in 1860. I, they experienced the vertigo that comes to all, even snobs, when they note that no place at the table has been set for them. (Although their works were joint, each brother wrote in the first person singular.)

My Paris, where I was born, the Paris of life as it stood between 1830 and 1848, is passing away. Social life is undergoing a great evolution. I see women, children, households, families in this café. The interior is doomed. Life threatens to become public. The club for the top rank, the café for the bottom: that is where society and the crowd will end up...I have a sensation of passing through, as if I were a traveler. I am a stranger to what is coming, to what is, as I am to those new boulevards, implacably straight, that no longer exude the world of Balzac, that conjure some American Babylon of the future.

"But their own Balzac had already seen as much: 'The ruins of the bourgeoisie will be an ignoble detritus of pasteboard, plaster, and pigment,' he had written fifteen years earlier. And a decade before that, when Louis-Philippe installed Napolean's Egyptian trophy on the site that had held the guillotine during the revolution, Chateaubriand felt apocalyptic intimations: 'The time will come when the obelisk of the desert will once again know, in that place of murder, the silence and solitude of Luxor.' "
----Luc Sante, The Other Paris

There is a big universe of French memoirs that reading this opens up (I haven't yet but looking forward to the NYRB edition. I wonder how it compares to Saint-Simon. The Goncourts are fantastic and well worth your time, Fizzles and all. Very vivid and gossipy.

Come to think of it most of my favourite French novelists effectively wrote lightly disguised memoirs: Proust, Genet (less so, but there is The Prisoner of Love, which I ought to re-read next year) and Celine.

thanks both - been meaning to read the goncourts for some time.

In one of the later volumes of In Search, there's a dazzling li'l send-up of/homage to the Concourts---narrator drops it almost absentmindedly, but even more otm in context.

Goncourts

so, after going off to get his commission in the navy, he gets to Brest and decides actually he doesn't want to do this after all and flits back to his family where he is greeted by Lucile (youngest of the elder sisters) with 'ecstatic kisses'.

he then doesn't pick up the memoirs again until three and a half years later, so he starts the next section setting the contemporary context again. one oddity of this section is its persistent sense of near death, but i looked at his dates and... well, you're only 49 CB, you don't get to go all morbid profundity just yet you know.

Between the last date attached to these Memoirs, January 1814 at the Vallée-aux-Loups, and today's date, July 1817 at Montboissier, three years and six months have elapsed. Did you hear the Empire fall? No: nothing has disturbed the tranquility of this spot. Yet the Empire has collapsed; the immense ruin has fallen in the course of my life, like Roman remains that have tumbled into the bed of some unknown stream. But events matter little to one who holds them of no account; a few years escaping the from the hands of the Eternal will do justice to all these noises by means of an endless silence.

see also

Let me make the most of the few moments left to me; let me hasten to describe my youth, while I can still remember it: the sailor, leaving an enchanted shore for ever, writes his journal within sight of land which is withdrawing and which will soon disappear from view

come on mate, why the long face:

by your own admission:

I was born with a lively disposition: drawn to both serious and pleasant things, I began with poetry before turning to prose; the arts delighted me; I have always been passionately fond of music and architecture. Although easily bored, I was capable of mastering the smallest details: gifted with a patience that was proof against anything, however tired I might be of the subject occupying my attention,. my perseverance was always stronger than my distaste. I have never abandoned a task which was worth completing; there are matters which I have pursued for fifteen or twenty years of my life, as full of ardour on the last day as on the first.

This mental suppleness was also apparent in things of secondary importance. I was good at chess, billiards, shooting and fencing; I drew tolerably well; I would have sung well too, if my voice had been trained. All this, combined with the way in which I was brought up and the life I have led as a soldier and traveller, explains why I have never played the pedant or displayed the stupid conceit, the awkwardness and the slovenly habits of the men of letters of former days, still less the arrogance and self-assurance e, the envy and blustering vanity of the new authors.

Truly a rousing tribute to oneself, think I'll mandate its reading at my funeral.

“i am effortlessly amazing, which is why i have never displayed the stupid conceit you see in others” is definitely a formula i will be using on my cv from now on, yes.

great thread, kiu

CB picks up his memoirs again, at a point this selection collects as 'Manhood'.

Yesterday evening I was walking by myself; the sky was like an autumn sky; a cold wind blew at intervals. Coming to a gap in the thicket, I stopped to look at the sun; it was sinking into the clouds above the tower of Alluye, from which Gabrielle [Gabrielle d'Estrées, Henri IV's mistress], occupying that tower, had seen the sun set, as I was seeing it now, two hundred years ago. What has become of Henri and Gabrielle? The same that will have become of me when these Memoirs are published.

I was distracted from these reflections by the twittering of a thrush perched on the topmost branch of a birch tree. At once that magnificent sound brought back before my eyes my father's domain; I forgot the disasters which I had recently witnessed and, carried back all of a sudden into the past, I saw once more the fields where I had so often heard the thrush's song. When I listened to it then, I was sad as I am today; but that first sadness was of the kind which springs from vague longing for happiness when one is still lacking in experience; the sadness which I feel now comes from the knowledge of things which I have appreciated and judged. The song of the bird in the Combourg woods told me of a happiness which I expected to achieve; the same song in the park at Montboissier reminded me of the days I had wasted in the pursuit of that unattainable happiness. I have nothing more to learn; I have travelled faster than others, and I have completed the tour of life.

CB posting to the 'this is the inevitable thread for ilxors in their forties' thread there.

Also a *very good* intro to the Manhood section as it is *full* of hilarious teen morbidity and sexual embarrassment, which he sees as *unique* in the *history humankind*, no one other than i has experienced such things etc.

Returning to my former state of idleness, I became more aware of what was lacking in my youth: I was a mystery to myself. I could not see a woman without feeling embarrassed; I blushed if she spoke to me. My shyness, already excessive in anybody's company, was so great with a woman that I would have preferred any torture to being left alone with her: yet no sooner had she gone than I longed for her to return. The descriptions of Virgil, Tibullus and Massillon, it is true, presented themselves to my memory; but the image of my mother and my sister, covering everything with its purity, made thicker the veils which Nature sought to raise; filial and brotherly love decried me with regard to any less disinterested affection. If the loveliest slaves of a seraglio had been handed over to me, I would not have known what to ask of them: chance enlightened me.

A neighbour of the Combourg domain came to spend a few days at the château with his wife, who was extremely pretty. Something, I forget exactly what, happened in the village; everyone ran to one of the windows of the great hall to look. I got there first, our fair guest followed hard on my heels, and I turned round to give her my place. Involuntarily she blocked my way, and I found myself pressed between her and the window. I ceased to be conscious of what was happening around me.

At that moment I became aware that to love and be loved in a manner which was unknown to me must be the supreme happiness. If I had done what other men do, I should soon have come to know the pains and pleasures of the passion whose seeds I carried within me; but everything in me assumed an extraordinary character. The fervour of my imagination, my shyness and solitude were such that, instead of going out into society, I fell back upon myself; for want of a real object of my love, I evoked, by the strength of my vague longings, a phantom which never left my side. I do not know whether the history of the human heart offers another example of this nature.

1) I've got a slightly different idea of what was lacking in his youth - he lived in the middle of nowhere, only ever seeing his close family, fancied his sister, was a teenager and wasn't getting any.

2) that scene at the window is hilarious, and obv the woman knew very well what she was doing

3) it's a characteristic of these memoirs that he frequently expresses the belief that he is the only person who could possibly had such an experience, either because of his great abilities and refinement, or the accident of time and place. Earlier he has stated that he is one of the only people who is able to testify to both feudal France and

BUT

to be fair to the lad, this sort of Romantic expression *was* new - it's the eve of the French Revolution. It's one of those things where it's hard to believe the experience of coming out the other side of puberty hasn't ever involved this sort of turmoil, or that manners in society often frustrated the natural sexual urges, leading to a great deal of frustration. but it's certainly also likely that this *mode* of expression, of the agonies of the self, was novel, may have seemed unique, where to us it now feels natural, perhaps even cliched. CB is perhaps a sort of pioneer in these spaces.

What's impressive is the extent to which the mature CB, the memoirist, is able to very clearly feel his teenage pangs. But it's also a bit perplexing that despite his long experience of life and people he still perceives the uniqueness of the experience (it's easy in our youth, less easy as we perhaps look back cynically on ourselves, to do so in age.

I'm waiting for the NYRB new translation coming out in late February, which I pre-ordered. Now I'm looking forward to reading M. de Chateaubriand.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/01/11/chateaubriand-life-society-dissolving/

Annoyingly, I really want to read this after Fizzles's posts, and I'm ~95% sure I already own a copy of the Penguin edition, but can't find it, but know the moment I buy a new copy the old one will turn up