[Sidenote: Last visits to Combourg.] From that day I saw Combourg but three times: after my father's death we met, in mourning, to share our inheritance and take leave of each other. On another occasion I accompanied my mother to Combourg: she was engaged in furnishing the castle, in expectation of the arrival of my brother, who was to bring my sister-in-law to Brittany. My brother did not come; he was soon, with his young wife, to receive at the hands of the executioner a different pillow from that prepared by my mother's hands. Lastly, I passed through Combourg a third time on my road to Saint-Malo to embark for America. The castle was abandoned, I had to put up at the steward's lodge. Wandering through the Great Mall, from the bottom of a dark avenue I caught sight of the deserted steps, the closed door and windows, and fainted away. I had difficulty in making my way back to the village: I sent for my horses and left in the middle of the night. After an absence of fifteen years, and before again leaving France on my visit to the Holy Land, I went to Fougères to embrace what remained of my family. I had not the courage to undertake the pilgrimage to the fields to which the most vivid portion of my existence was attached. It is in the woods of Combourg that I became what I am, that I began to feel the first attacks of the weariness which I have dragged with me through life, of the sadness which has been my torment and my felicity. There I sought for a heart that could beat in touch with mine; there I saw my family united only to disperse. My father there dreamt of his name restored, of the fortunes of his house revived: another illusion which time and the revolutions have dispelled. Of six children that we were, we remain but three: my brother, Julie and Lucile are no more, my mother died of grief, my father's ashes were snatched from his grave. If my works survive me, if I am to leave a name behind me, perhaps one day, prompted by these Memoirs, some traveller will come to visit the spots I have depicted. He will be able to recognize the castle; but he will look in vain for the great wood: the cradle of my dreams has vanished like those dreams. Left standing alone upon its rock, the ancient keep mourns the oaks, the old friends that surrounded it and protected it against the storm. Isolated also, I too have seen falling around me the family which beautified my days and lent me its shelter: fortunately my life is not built upon the earth so solidly as the towers in which I spent my youth, nor does man offer to the tempests a resistance so great as that of the monuments raised by his hands. [147] This book was written at the Château de Montboissier (July-August 1817) and at the Vallée-aux-Loups (November 1817), and revised in December 1846.--T. [148] Florio's MONTAIGNE, Booke III. chap. 5: _Of Diverting and Diversions._--T.