In Search of an Author

IF you love travel and literature both, I propose a programme for at least a few of your holidays. Gird yourself and embark on a pilgrimage of letters. When you have read a great book — and read it over again — visit the place where it was written, learn the joy of tracing over their own background the inspiration, the first sketch of some picture blazoned by a master. Follow across country, from town to town, from house to house, the life, the very steps of a great man. I think you will find a rare delight in such a trip, for you will enliven and enrich the beauty of nature by recapturing the emotion beauty once has stirred, and will love still more the long-beloved page by poring over it again in the countryside that gave it birth.

That is how I have just passed three weeks in Brittany, the home of François René de Chateaubriand. If you would follow my steps, go first to Saint-Malo, the beautiful granite city clasped in its noble ramparts; you will find untouched the mansions of those shipowners, half slavers, half pirates, in which lived his forbears. You can see, buffeted by the Atlantic, the very room where the guiltless René’s mother ‘cursed him with birth,’ from its window descry the sombre craggy islet of the Grand Bé to which he left his body. Then, working inland, you can divide his childhood between Plancoët and Combourg — as Swann and Guermantes disputed Proust.

His mother’s serene and happy family surely bequeathed him the sunny side of his character. They lived at Plancoët, a charming town gazing down upon its river. In his grandmother’s terraced garden, in his uncle’s château, — still, one feels, atinkle with laughter, — live over with him ‘his only happiness.’ At Combourg he spent a terrible year among his father’s grim silences, his sister’s visions, and the busy pieties of his mother; the superb pages on which he describes it will come to life below the Gothic melancholy of the castle, beside the water-pleasaunce choked by reeds. Even his schoolboy scenes arc near at hand, in Dinan and Do!. His father’s father’s farmstead, the cradle of the clan, is still standing in the country outside the hamlet of Guitté — should curiosity go so far. The life story of this great Breton is written on the very soil of Brittany, and to-day you may still trace it up to the gates of his tomb.

This was the country, too, of Félicité de Lamennais, and what a contrast to step from Combourg to La Chênaie: from the high forbidding walls to the white manor with huge gray windows; from the stately alleys of the park to the mysterious, the frondcd rustic mazes of the household garden; from the misty melancholy tarn to the straggling lake, now shaded by and now reflecting the overhanging beech and oak. As a youth, ‘pallid and gaunt,’ he used to sit upon its moss-clad rock. Around him, under these very trees, gathered his faithful: Maurice de Guérin, the gentle abbé Gerbet, the young Montalembert, so shy yet so precise, — Lacordaire said of him, ‘I love him as if he were a peasant,’ — and Lacordaire himself, who one evening, having quarreled with his host, fled from La Chênaic but still from far could see, across the coppice, Lamennais among his disciples. It was the gift of Jean Tharaud, who lives near La Chênaie, to evoke this group for me. May you have as good a guide. Failing him, take Sainte-Beuve, or sit on the very bench of ‘bien-aimé Féli’ and read his letters once again.

I could never have done with the literary pilgrimages of Brittany. We have still to go to Tréguier with Renan, to Les Rochers with Madame de Sévigné. The marvel of a country where culture roots so deep is that you touch its branches with each step. Are you coming to Normandy? Then do not miss PetitCouronne, near Rouen, and see that meadow where, on a stone table, The Cid was created; go to Croisset, and enter the ‘jawing-room’ of Flaubert. Périgord? Visit Brantôme without fail; at Hautefort salute Bertrand de Born, the troubadour. Stop at Montaigne’s château and repeat within its famous tower a pithy phrase from his Essays. Loyal as he, visit the lovely house of La Boétie at Sarlat. This fascinating town should be the Salzburg of France, with Molière its Mozart. And last, commune at Montignac with the exquisite Joubert, the earthy Eugène Le Roy.

I wish the travel agencies — or perhaps some learned editor — would make us a literary map of France, marked out with the countries of Stendhal, of Proust, of Barbey d’Aurcvilly. Not only we Frenchmen, but countless teachers and students from abroad, would be glad to bind the memory of our reading to the earth whence it sprang, and to follow Balzac through France as we pursue Ulysses around the Mediterranean. The traveler would benefit, staking his halting place by the shadow of giants; our own countrymen too, welcoming him and learning better to know their great men; and even the writers themselves, being more truly honored and more deeply loved.

‘Seldom,’ says La Bruyère, ‘does one take a vow or endure a pilgrimage to beseech from one’s saint a broken and a contrite heart.’ But who knows? Some day, perhaps, pilgrims will climb Rilke’s tower to beg humility and insight — will tread the Graveyard by the Sea to ask from Heaven, by the grace of Valéry, a grain more wisdom.