These stories took up the whole of the time occupied by my mother and sister in preparing for the night: they got into bed dying of fright; I climbed to the top of my turret; the cook returned to the main tower, and the men went down to their basement. [Sidenote: My lonely nights.] The window of my donjon opened upon the inner courtyard; by day I had a view of the battlements of the curtain opposite, where hart's-tongues grew and a wild plum-tree. Some martins, which in summer buried themselves, screeching, in the holes in the walls, were my sole companions. At night I could see only a small strip of sky and a few stars. When the moon shone and sank in the east, I knew it by the beams which struck my bed across the lozenged window-panes. Owls, flitting from one tower to the other, passed and passed again between the moon and me, outlining the mobile shadow of their wings upon my curtains. Banished to the loneliest part, at the opening of the galleries, I lost not a murmur of the darkness. Sometimes the wind seemed to trip with light steps; sometimes it uttered wailings; suddenly my door was violently shaken, groans issued from the basement, and then these sounds would die away, only to commence anew. At four o'clock in the morning, the voice of the master of the castle, calling the footman at the entrance to the venerable vaults, made itself heard like the voice of the last phantom of the night. This voice supplied for me the place of the sweet harmony with the sound of which Montaigne's father was wont to awaken his son[161]. The Comte de Chateaubriand's stubbornness in making a child sleep alone at the top of a tower might have had its inconvenience, but it turned out to my advantage. This violent manner of treatment left me with the courage of a man, without taking from me that vivid imagination of which it is nowadays the tendency to deprive the young. Instead of seeking to persuade me that ghosts did not exist, they obliged me to set them at defiance. When my father asked me, with an ironical smile, "Is monsieur le chevalier afraid?" he could have made me sleep with a corpse. When my excellent mother said, "My child, nothing happens without God's leave; you have nothing to fear from evil spirits so long as you remain a good Christian," I was more reassured than by all the arguments of philosophy. So complete was my success, that the night winds, in my uninhabited tower, served but as playthings for my fancies and wings for my dreams. My imagination, thus kindled, spread over every object, found nowhere sufficient nourishment, and could have devoured heaven and earth. It is this moral condition which it is now my task to describe. Immersed once more in the days of my youth, I will try to grasp myself in the past, to depict myself such as I was, such as perhaps I regret that I no longer am, despite the torments which I then endured. *