My grandmother entrusted to her son René the care of her son Pierre, M. de Chateaubriand du Plessis[26] whose son, Armand de Chateaubriand, was shot, by order of Bonaparte, on Good Friday[27] 1809. He was one of the last of the French nobles to die for the cause of the monarchy. My father took charge of his brother's fate, although the habit of suffering had endowed him with a sternness of character that lasted through his life. _Non ignara mali_ is not always a true saying: unhappiness has its harsh as well as its gentle side. M. de Chateaubriand was tall and spare; he had an aquiline nose and thin, pale lips; his eyes were deep-set, small, and of a bluish or sea-green color, like the eyes of lions or of the barbarians of olden time. I have never seen an expression like theirs: when inflamed with anger, each flashing pupil seemed to shoot out and strike you like a bullet. My father was governed by one sole passion, that of his name. His general condition was one of deep sadness, which increased with age, and of a silence from which he issued only in fits of anger. Avaricious in the hope of restoring to his family its pristine splendour, haughty of demeanour with the nobles at the States of Brittany, harsh with his dependants at Combourg, taciturn, despotic and threatening at home, the feeling which the sight of him inspired was one of fear. Had he lived until the Revolution, and had he been younger, he would have played a great part, or got himself massacred in his castle. He was certainly possessed of genius: I have no doubt that, at the head of an administration or an army, he would have been a man out of the ordinary. He first thought of marriage on returning from America. Born on the 23rd of September 1718, he was thirty-five years of age when, on the 3rd of July 1753, he married Apolline Jeanne Suzanne de Bedée, born 7 April 1726, and daughter of Messire Ange Annibal Comte de Bedée, Seigneur de La Bouëtardais. He took up his residence with her at Saint-Malo, within seven or eight leagues of which both of them had been born, so that their house commanded the horizon under which they had first seen the light. My maternal grandmother, Marie Anne de Ravenel de Boisteilleul, Dame de Bedée, born at Rennes on the 16th of October 1698, had been brought up at Saint-Cyr during the last years of Madame de Maintenon: her education had left its mark upon her daughters.