My mother was endowed with great wit and intelligence, and with a prodigious imagination; her mind had been formed by the works of Fénelon, Racine, Madame de Sévigné, and stored with anecdotes of the Court of Louis XIV.; she knew the whole of _Cyrus_[28] by heart. Apolline de Bedée was dark, short and ill-favoured, with large features; the elegance of her manners, the vivacity of her temperament, formed a contrast with my father's stiffness and calm. Loving society as much as he loved solitude, as humoursome and animated as he was cold and unimpassioned, she had no tastes but what were opposed to her husband's. The antagonism which she encountered saddened her naturally gay and light-hearted disposition. Obliged to hold her tongue when she would have wished to speak, she made amends to herself by a kind of clamorous melancholy broken with sighs which alone interrupted my father's silent gloom. For piety my mother was an angel. My mother was brought to bed at Saint-Malo of an eldest son, who died in the cradle and was christened Geoffroy, like almost all the first-born of my family. This son was followed by another and by two daughters, none of whom lived more than a few months. [Sidenote: My birth and baptism.] These four children died of an extravasation of blood on the brain. At last my mother bore a third son, who was named Jean-Baptiste: it was he who later married M. de Malesherbes' grand-daughter. After Jean-Baptiste came four daughters: Marie-Anne, Bénigne, Julie and Lucile, all four endowed with rare beauty; the two eldest alone survived the storms of the Revolution. Beauty, that serious trifle, remains when all the rest has passed away. I was the last of the ten children. Probably my four sisters owed their existence to my father's desire to assure the perpetuation of his name through the arrival of a second boy; I resisted, I had an aversion to life. Here is my baptismal certificate[29]: "Extract from the civil register of the Commune of Saint-Malo for the year 1768. "François René de Chateaubriand, son of René de Chateaubriand and of Pauline Jeanne Suzanne de Bedée, his wife, born 4 September 1768, baptized on the following day by us Pierre Henri Nouail, grand-vicar of the Bishop of Saint-Malo. Godfather, Jean-Baptiste de Chateaubriand, his brother, and godmother, Françoise-Gertrude de Contades, who sign with the father. Thus signed on the register: Contades de Plouër, Jean-Baptiste de Chateaubriand, Brignon de Chateaubriand, de Chateaubriand, and Nouail, vicar-general[30]." It will be observed that I have made a mistake in my Works: I say that I was born on the 4th of October[31] and not on the 4th of September; my Christian names are François René and not François Auguste[32].