At Combourg I found a Mission on which to feed my piety; I followed its exercises. I received confirmation on the manor steps, with the peasant lads and lasses, from the hand of the Bishop of Saint-Malo. After that, a cross was erected; I helped to hold it, while it was being fixed upon its base. It still exists: it stands in front of the tower in which my father died. For thirty years, it has seen no one appear at the windows of that tower; it is no longer saluted by the castle children; every spring-time it waits for them in vain; it sees none return save the swallows, the companions of my childhood, more faithful to their nest than man to his house. How happy should I have been, had my life been spent at the foot of that mission cross, had my hair been whitened only by the years which have covered the arms of that cross with moss! [Sidenote: I go to Rennes College.] I did not long delay my departure for Rennes, where I was to continue my studies and complete my mathematical course, before submitting myself for examination as a Naval Guard[122] at Brest. M. de Fayolle was principal of Rennes College. The staff of that Breton Juilly[123] included three distinguished professors: the Abbé de Chateaugiron, master of the second form, the Abbé Germé, master of rhetoric, and the Abbé Marchand, of physics. There were a large number of boarders and day-scholars, and the classes were strong. Within living memory, Geoffroy[124] and Ginguené[125], who were educated at the college, would have done honour to Sainte-Barbe[126] or the Plessis. The Chevalier de Parny[127] had also studied at Rennes; I succeeded to his bed in the room allotted to me. Rennes seemed to me a Babylon, the college a world. The crowd of masters and school-boys, the size of the buildings, garden, and play-grounds appeared immense to my eyes[128]. I grew accustomed to it, however. On the saint's-day of the principal, we had a holiday; at the top of our voices we sang in his praise superb lines of our own composing, in which we said: Ô Terpsichore, ô Polymnie, Venez, venez remplir nos vœux; La raison même vous convie[129].