The house in which my parents were then living at Saint-Malo stands in a dark and narrow street called the Rue des Juifs[33]: it has now been turned into an inn[34]. The room in which my mother was confined overlooks a bare portion of the city wall, and from the windows one can contemplate an endless expanse of sea, which breaks upon the rocks. My god-father, as appears from my baptismal certificate, was my brother, and my godmother the Comtesse de Plouër, daughter of the Marshal de Contades[35]. I was almost dead when I first saw the light. The roaring of the waves, upheaved by a squall which heralded the autumnal equinox, deadened my cries: I have often been told these details; their sadness has never been erased from my memory. A day seldom passes on which, reflecting on what I have been, I do not see again in thought the rock upon which I was born, the room in which my mother inflicted life upon me, the tempest whose sound first lulled me to sleep, the unfortunate brother who gave me a name which I have nearly always dragged through misfortune. Heaven seemed to unite these several circumstances in order to lay within my cradle a symbol of my destiny. [Illustration: Chateaubriand's birth place at St. Malo.] On leaving my mother's breast I underwent my first exile: I was banished to Plancoët, a pretty village situated between Dinan, Saint-Malo and Lamballe. My mother's only brother, the Comte de Bedée, had built a house near the village, to which he gave the name of Monchoix. My maternal grand-mother's property stretched from this neighbourhood to the market-town of Courseul, the Curiosolites of Cæsar's Commentaries. My grandmother, since many years a widow, lived with her sister, Mademoiselle de Boisteilleul, in a hamlet divided from Plancoët by a bridge, and known as the Abbaye, from a Benedictine abbey dedicated to Our Lady of Nazareth. [Sidenote: My nurse's vow.] My nurse was sterile; another poor Christian took me to her breast. She vowed me to the patron of the hamlet, Our Lady of Nazareth, and promised that I should wear blue and white in her honor for seven years. I had lived but a few hours, and already the weight of years was marked upon my brow. Why did they not let me die? God in His wisdom granted to the prayer of humbleness and innocence the preservation of a life for which a vain renown was lying in wait. This vow of the Breton peasant woman is no longer in the spirit of the age: yet nothing can be more touching than the intervention of a Divine Mother coming between Heaven and the child and sharing the terrestrial mother's solicitude.