Chateaubriand's memoirs, V, 6

Paris, October 1821.

I left my mother, and went to visit my elder sisters near Fougères. I stayed a month with Madame de Chateaubourg. Her two country houses, Lascardais and Le Plessis, near Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier, known for its fortress and its battle, were situated in a country of rocks, moors and woods. My sister had Monsieur Livorel as her steward, a former Jesuit, to whom a strange thing happened.

After he was appointed as steward of Lascardais, it chanced that the Comte de Chateaubourg, the father, died: Monsieur Livorel who had not met him was installed as guardian of the castle. The first night he slept there alone, he saw a pale old man, in a dressing gown and night-cap, enter his apartment, carrying a little candle. The apparition approached the hearth, set his candlestick down on the mantelpiece, relit the fire and sat down in his armchair. Monsieur Livorel trembled all over. After two hours of silence, the old man rose, took up his candle, and left the room, closing the door.

Next day, the steward told the farmers of his adventure, who on hearing his description of the lemur affirmed that it was their old master. It did not end there: if Monsieur Livorel glanced behind him in the forest, he saw the phantom; if he had to cross a stile in the fields, the shade was straddling the stile. One day, the persecuted wretch ventured to say: ‘Monsieur de Chateaubourg, leave me alone’; the revenant replied: ‘No.’ Monsieur Livorel, a sober-minded realist, quite lacking in imagination, would retell his story to whoever might wish it, always in the same manner and with the same conviction.

Sometime later in Normandy I was in the company of a brave officer suffering from cerebral fever. We were found lodgings in a farmhouse: an old tapestry, lent by the owner of the place, separated my bed from that of the sick man. Behind the tapestry they bled the patient; to ease his suffering they plunged him in icy baths; he shivered under this torture, his fingernails turned blue, his face was a purple grimace; with teeth clenched and head bared the long beard falling from his pointed chin served to cover his wet, skinny naked chest.

When the illness touched him, he opened an umbrella, thinking to shelter from his tears: if such a method indeed protected against tears a statue would need to be erected in honour of its discoverer.

My only moments of relief were those when I would walk in the village churchyard, built on a little hill. My companions there were the dead, a few birds, and the setting sun. I would dream of society in Paris, my early years, my phantom, and those woods of Combourg which I was so near to in space, so distant from in time; I would return again to my poor wretch: it was the blind leading the blind.

Alas! A blow, a fall, a moral affliction might have robbed Homer, Newton, Bossuet of their genius, and those divine mortals, instead of exciting profound pity, bitter and eternal regrets, might have become objects of derision! Many people I have known and loved happened to have their reason disturbed when with me, as if I carried the seeds of contagion. I can only explain Cervantes’ masterpiece and its cruel cheerfulness, by a sad reflection: in considering the whole of being, in weighing good and evil, one might be tempted to wish for any event that brought forgetfulness, as a means of escaping oneself: a joyful drunkard is a happy creature. Religion aside, ignorance is bliss, to reach death without having suffered life.

I brought back my compatriot completely cured.