Saint-Malo

I was accompanied to Saint-Malo by Monsieur de La Morandais, a gentleman of good family, whom poverty had reduced to being the steward of the Combourg estate. He wore a coat of grey camlet, with a little silver band at the collar, and a cap or headpiece of grey felt with earflaps, with a peak in front. He put me behind him on the crupper of his mare Isabelle. I held on to the belt that carried his hunting knife, attached to the outside of his coat: I was delighted. When Claude de Bullion, and President de Lamoignon’s father, travelled to the country, as children: ‘They were both carried by the same donkey, in the panniers, one on one side, and one on the other, and they packed a loaf of bread next to Lamoignon, since he was lighter than his friend, to act as a counterweight.’ (Memoirs of President de Lamoignon)
Monsieur de La Morandais took shortcuts:

Gladly, in a noble manner,
On he rode by wood and river:
For no one rode more cheerfully
Than François beneath the tree.

We stopped for dinner at a Benedictine Abbey, which, for lack of a sufficient number of monks had been incorporated in a leading community of the order. We only found the bursar there, who had been charged with disposing of the furnishings, and selling the timber. He served us an excellent meal without meat, in what had been the Prior’s library: we ate a quantity of new-laid eggs with some carp and huge pike. Through the arches of a cloister I could see tall sycamores, bordering a pond. An axe struck at the foot of each tree, its crown trembled in the air, and it fell, providing us with a show. Carpenters from Saint-Malo were sawing off green branches as one trims hair on a young head, or squaring off the fallen trunks. My heart bled at the sight of those decimated woods and that deserted monastery. The general sack of religious houses has reminded me since of the despoliation of the abbey, which was for me a portent.
Arriving at Saint-Malo, I met the Marquis de Causans; under his escort I traversed the avenues of the camp. The tents, the stacks of weapons, the tethered horses, made an attractive scene together with the sea and its vessels, and the high walls and distant steeples of the town. I saw pass by, on a barb at full gallop, one of those men with whom a world draws to an end, the Duc de Lauzun. The Prince de Carignan, having joined the camp married Monsieur de Boisgarin’s daughter, charming though a little lame: it caused a great row and led to a legal case that Monsieur Lacretelle the Elder is even now defending. But what relationship do these events have to my life? ‘In proportion as the memory of my intimate friends gives them a complete view of their subject,’ says Montaigne, ‘so they push their narrative into the past, so that if the story is a good one they smother its virtues, if it is not you curse their fortunate powers of memory or their unfortunate lack of judgement…..I have known some very amusing tales become most tiresome in the mouth of a certain gentleman.’ I am afraid of being that gentleman.

BkII:Chap3:Sec3

My brother was at Saint-Malo, when Monsieur de La Morandais deposited me there. One evening he said: ‘I’m taking you to the theatre: get your hat.’ I lost my head and went straight to the cellar to find my hat which was in the attic. A troupe of strolling players had just arrived. I had seen marionettes; I imagined that at the theatre one saw puppets much superior to those in the street.
I arrive with beating heart at a wooden building on a deserted road. I entered through 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 began: they were performing Diderot’s Le Père de famille. I saw two men walking about the stage and talking, while everybody looked at them. I took them for the managers of the puppet-show, chatting outside the Old Woman’s hut, waiting for the audience to arrive: I was surprised only by the fact that they talked so loudly of their affairs, and were listened to in silence. My astonishment grew when other people arriving on stage started waving their arms about and weeping, and everyone started weeping in sympathy. The curtain fell without my understanding anything of this. My brother went downstairs to the foyer between the two plays. Left in the box among strangers, a situation which my shyness rendered a torment, I would have preferred to be in the haven of my school. Such was the first impression I gained of the art of Sophocles and Molière.

daqui. livro 2 capítulo 3.

e

The house my parents occupied at that time is situated in a dark, narrow street in Saint-Malo, called the Rue des Juifs: today the house has been converted into an inn. The room in which my mother gave birth overlooks a deserted stretch of the city walls, and from the windows of that room one can perceive the sea, stretching as far as the eye can see, breaking on the reefs. My godfather, as one can see from my baptismal certificate, was my brother, and my godmother was the Comtesse de Plouër, daughter of the Maréchal de Contades. I was near death when I entered the world. The roaring of the waves, whipped up by a squall heralding the autumn equinox, prevented my cries being heard: these details have often been told to me; their sadness has never been erased from my memory. There is never a day that, thinking of what I have been, I do not picture again in my thoughts the rock on which I was born, the room where my mother inflicted life on me, the tempest whose roaring lulled my first sleep, the unfortunate brother who named me, with a name that I have almost always trailed amidst misery. Heaven seems to have brought these diverse circumstances together in order to place an image of my destiny over my cradle.

do livro um (Mémoires d’outre-tombe, Chateaubriand)