On my return from Brest the gentry at Combourg Castle consisted of four: my father, my mother, my sister, and me. A woman-cook, a waiting-maid, two footmen and a coachman composed the whole household: two old mares and a sporting-dog were huddled in a corner of the stable. These twelve living beings were lost to sight in a manor-house where a hundred knights, their ladies, squires, and varlets, and King Dagobert's chargers and pack might almost have gone unnoticed. All through the year, not a visitor presented himself at the castle, save a few gentlemen, the Marquis de Montlouet[156], the Comte de Goyon-Beaufort[157], who begged a night's lodging on their way to plead their suits before the Parliament. They used to arrive in winter, on horseback, with pistols in their saddle-bows, hunting-knives at their sides, and followed by a servant, also on horseback, with a livery trunk behind him. [Sidenote: Visitors to Combourg.] My father, always very ceremonious, received them bareheaded on the steps, in the midst of the wind and rain. Once inside the house, the country gentlemen would talk of their Hanoverian campaigns, their family affairs, their law-suits. At night they were conducted to the North Tower, to Queen Christina's bed-chamber, a state-room containing a bed seven feet by seven, hung with a double set of curtains in green muslin and crimson silk, and held up by four gilt Cupids. The next morning, when I came down to the great hall and looked out through the windows upon the country covered with floods or hoar-frost, I saw nothing except two or three travelers on the lonely embankment of the pond: it was our guests riding away to Rennes. These visitors did not know much about the things of life; nevertheless our view was by their means extended a few miles beyond the horizon of our woods. When they were gone, we were reduced on week-days to our family circle, and on Sundays to the company of the village commoners and the neighboring gentry. On Sundays, in fine weather, my mother, Lucile, and I went to the parish church across the Little Mall and along a country road; when it rained, we went by the abominable Combourg High Street. We were not carried, like the Abbé de Marolles[158], in a light chariot drawn by four white horses, captured from the Turks in Hungary. My father went but once a year to the parish church to perform his Easter duties; the rest of the year he heard Mass in the castle chapel. Seated in the pew of the lord of the manor, we received the incense and the prayers in front of the black marble sepulchre of Renée de Rohan: a symbol of mortal honors; a few grains of incense before a tomb!