Chateaubriand and Chateau de Combourg

Author François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand 1768 - 1848

Chateaubriand was born in Saint-Malo, the first stop on our ghostly hunting visit in the north of France. He was an author, politician and diplomat and is considered to be the founder of the Romanticism movement in French literature. Lord Byron was impressed with his work and Victor Hugo wrote, "To be Chateaubriand or nothing."

Chateaubriand joined the military at a young age. In 1788, he visited Paris where he met several leading writers of his time. When the French revolution broke out, he was initially sympathetic, then turned against it and consequently headed to North America in 1791. 

His journey to North America inspired his exotic novels Les Natchez, Atala and René.  

When he returned to France, he joined the Royalist forces supporting the return of the king and married a  young aristocrat from Saint-Malo whom he had never met. Described as dashing and handsome, he had a way with women and was notoriously unfaithful to his wife. 

Almost fatally wounded during a clash between Royalist forces and the French Revolution Army, he was carried into exile in England where he lived in poverty. There he discovered English Literature, notably Milton's Paradise Lost, which he later famously translated into French prose. 

Chateaubriand was able to return to France in 1800. He promptly wrote Génie du christianize  or The Genius of Christianity. Thanks to this manuscript, he won favor in the eyes of Napoleon and was assigned various political posts. He resigned in disgust when Napoleon ordered the execution of Louis XVI's brother, the duke Louis-Antoine-Henri de Bourbon-Condé, Duc d'Enghien.

The man had nine lives it seems for, finding himself once again without money, he unexpectedly received a very large sum of it from the Russina Tsarina who championed him as a defender of Christianity.

His new found wealth enabled him to travel to Jerusalem, Palestine, Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece and Spain which inspired him to write: Les Martyrs, Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem and The Adventures of the Last Abencerrage.  

Speaking of a cat with nine lives and wondering what nurtured such passion and darkness in the man, we turn to look to his childhood which was spent in the Chateau de Combourg.

A quote from his Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, Book III Chapter III which was published posthumously. 

"Before I retired, my mother and my sister would ask me to look under the beds, in the fireplace, behind the doors, to visit the staircase, the passages and adjoining corridors. All the castle legends, of thieves and ghosts, were returning to their minds. People were convinced that a certain Comte de Combourg, with a wooden leg, dead for three centuries, appeared at certain times, and that he had been encountered on the big staircase of the turret; on occasion his wooden leg would walk around on its own, accompanied by a black cat.

A few years earlier my sisters, very young then, had found themselves alone at Combourg with my father. One night they were reading together about the death of Clarissa (in Samuel Richardson's novel). Already very upset by the details of his death, they hear clearly footsteps on the stairs leading to their apartment. Terrified, they blow out their light and fling themselves into their beds. Someone is approaching; someone reaches the door of their bedroom; someone stops, as if to listen; then someone turns into a secret staircase communicating with my father's room. After a little time, someone comes back, someone crosses the antechamber again, and the sound of the retreating steps is lost in the depths of the castle. On the following day, my sisters did not dare speak; they were afraid that the ghost, or the thief, might have been my father wanting to surprise them. He put them at ease by asking whether they had heard anything. He told them that someone had knocked at the wicket of the secret staircase leading to his room, and would have broken in but for a chest that happened to be standing against the door. Awaking with a start, he had seized his pistols, for he was armed at all times. 

The nose ceased, he supposed he had been mistaken, and he went back to sleep.

Another time, during a December evening, my father was writing, alone, by the fireplace at the end of the Great Hall. A door opens behind him; he turns his head and catches sight of a sort of tall goblin, with a face as black as ebony, rolling its haggard eyes. Monsieur de Chateaubriand seizes from the fire the tongs used to shift the elm logs. Armed with the red-hot tongs, he rises and walks towards the black apparition, which goes out, slips through the shadows, and fades into the night." 

A common medieval practice to ward off evil spirits and to protect a castle was to kill a black cat and encase it in a wall.

As a child, Chateaubriand slept in the "Tower of the Cat" at Chateau de Combourg where this mummified feline was found during restoration in 1876. You can see it on display in Chateaubriand's quarters when you visit the chateau.

Imagine the young Chateaubriand sleeping in the Tower of the Cat with wind howling or owls hooting at night, hearing the thump, thump of the ghost of the Marquis de Combourg's wooden leg as he walks the lonely corridors, alone, conjuring up the chilling specter that his father described .... a rich and inspiring, gloomy, esoteric environment indeed.

Every year Le Prix Combourg is awarded to an author whose style honors the memory and work of Chateaubriand. 

Tomorrow we will continue to explore the fertile esoteric land of the ancients Celts, Druids, King Arthur and Merlin in the enchanted forest of Paimpont.

Gros bisous de littérature un peu ésotérique et a demain!

Love, Charley