Our Sunday diversions vanished with the day; they did not even recur regularly. During the bad weather, entire months would pass and not a single human being knock at the gate of our fortress. The sadness was great that hung over the moors of Combourg, but greater still at the castle: as one made his way beneath its vaultings, he experienced the same feeling as on entering the Carthusian Monastery at Grenoble[159]. When I visited the latter in 1805, I crossed a wilderness which increased in desolation as I went; I thought it would end at the monastery, but I was shown, within the very convent walls, the gardens of the Carthusian Friars even more neglected than the woods. And at length, in the centre of the monument, I found, shrouded in the folds of all this solitude, the former graveyard of the community, a sanctuary from which eternal silence, the genius of the place, spread its dominion over the mountains and forests around. [Sidenote: Life at Combourg Castle.] The gloomy stillness of Combourg Castle was increased by my father's taciturn and unsocial humour. Instead of drawing his family and his retainers closer to him, he had dispersed them to all the winds of the building. His bedroom was in the small east tower, his study in the small west tower. The furniture of this study consisted of three chairs in black leather and a table covered with parchments and title-deeds. A genealogical tree of the Chateaubriand family adorned the chimney-mantel, and in the embrasure of a window hung arms of all sorts, from a pistol to a blunderbuss. My mother's room extended over the great hall, between the two small towers; it had a parqueted flooring and was adorned with faceted Venetian mirrors. My sister occupied a closet leading out of my mother's room. The waiting-maid slept far away, on the ground floor between the two great towers. Myself, I was nestled in a sort of isolated cell at the top of the turret containing the staircase which led from the inner yard to the different parts of the castle. At the foot of this staircase, my father's valet and the other man-servant lay in a vaulted basement, and the cook kept garrison in the great west tower. My father rose at four o'clock in the morning, winter and summer alike: he went to the inner yard to call and wake his valet at the entrance to the turret staircase. A cup of coffee was brought to him at five; he then worked in his study till midday. My mother and sister each breakfasted in her own chamber at eight o'clock. I had no fixed time for rising or breakfasting; I was supposed to study till noon: the greater part of the time I did nothing.