My mother had constantly desired that I should be given a classical education. The career of a sailor, for which I was intended, "would perhaps," she said, "not be to my taste;" she thought that, in any event, it would be well to make me capable of following another profession. Her piety led her to hope that I should decide in favour of the Church. She therefore proposed to send me to a college where I should learn mathematics, drawing, fencing and English; she did not mention Greek or Latin for fear of scaring my father; but she intended to have me taught them, at first in secret, and later openly, when I should have made progress. My father accepted her proposal: it was arranged to send me to the college at Dol. This town was selected because it lay upon the road from Saint-Malo to Combourg. In the very cold winter immediately preceding my school-days, the house in which we lived took fire: I was saved by my eldest sister, who carried me through the flames in her arms. M. de Chateaubriand, who had gone to his castle, sent for his wife to join him there: we did so in the spring. Spring in Brittany is milder than in the country round Paris, and the trees bud three weeks earlier. The five birds that herald its coming, the swallow, the loriot, the cuckoo, the quail, and the nightingale, come with the breezes that nestle in the gulfs of the Armorican Peninsula. The earth grows as thick with daisies, pansies, jonquils, narcissuses, hyacinths, ranunculuses, anemones as the neglected spaces around the churches of St. John Lateran and the Holy Cross of Jerusalem in Rome. Glades deck themselves with tall and graceful ferns; fields of broom and furze glow with flowers gay as golden butterflies. The hedgerows at whose feet strawberries, raspberries and violets abound are adorned with hawthorn, honeysuckle and brambles, whose brown and twisted shoots bear glorious fruit and leaves. The country is alive with bees and birds; swarms and nests greet the children at every step. In sheltered nooks, myrtle and oleander grow in the open as in Greece; the fig-tree ripens as in Provence; each apple-tree, with its carmine-tinted blossoms, resembles the large nosegay of a village bride. [Sidenote: Spring in Brittany.] In the twelfth century, the cantons of Fougères, Rennes, Bécherel, Dinan, Saint-Malo and Dol were covered by the Forest of Brécheliant, which had served as a battlefield to the Francs and the races peopling the Domnonée. Wace[80] tells of the wild man seen there, of the fountain of Berenton, and a golden basin. An historic document of the fifteenth century, the _Usemens et coutumes de la forêt de Brécilien_, confirms the statement of the _Roman du Rou_: it is, say the _Usemens_, of great and wide extent: "there are four castles, a very great number of fair pools, fine chaces where are found no venomous beasts nor insects, two hundred woods, as many springs, notably the fountain of Belenton, near which Sir Pontus wrought his feats of arms."