April through October visitors can tour the grand, medieval castle where the early romantic writer, François-René de Chateaubriand (1764-1848), spent part of his youth. Later he would recall those times in Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe. Hours are listed on the Château de Combourg website.
I was to accompany my sisters to Combourg: we set off on our journey in the first fortnight of May. We left Saint-Malo at sunrise, my mother, my fours sisters and I, in a huge old-fashioned Berlin, with lavishly gilded panels, exterior footboards, and with purple tassels at the four corners of the canopy. Eight horses, decked out like Spanish mules, bells round their necks and smaller ones on their bridles, with housings and woollen fringes in various colours, drew us along. While my mother sighed, and my sisters talked breathlessly, I gazed with both eyes, listened with both ears, and marvelled at every turn of the wheels: the first journey of a Wandering Jew who would never find rest. It would be fine if a man only changed place! But his days and his heart change too.
Our horses were rested at a fishing village on the Cancale shore. Afterwards we travelled through the marshes, and the busy town of Dol: passing the door of the college to which I would soon return, we drove deeper into the countryside.
For ten mortal miles we saw nothing but heath land encircled by woods, fallow tracts barely cleared, fields of sparse, stunted black corn, and scanty oats. Charcoal burners led strings of ponies with lank, tangled manes; long-haired peasants in goatskin tunics drove gaunt oxen with shrill cries or walked behind heavy ploughs, like labouring fauns. Finally we discovered a valley at the end of which not far from a pond rose the spire of a village church. At the western extremity of this village the turrets of a feudal château lifted above the tall trees of a wood lit by the setting sun.
I have been obliged to pause: my heart was beating to the point of shaking the table on which I write. The memories that awaken in my mind overwhelm me with their multiplicity and force: and yet what do they signify to the rest of the world?
Descending the hill we forded a stream; after a half-hour drive we left the main road, and the carriage rolled along beside a quincunx, in an avenue of trees whose summits met above our heads: I can still remember the moment when I entered that shade, and the fearful joy I experienced.
Leaving the darkness of the wood, we crossed a forecourt planted with walnut-trees, adjoining the steward’s house and garden; from there we emerged through a gateway into a grassy court, known as the Green Court. On the right were a run of stables and a clump of chestnut-trees. At the end of the courtyard whose ground rose imperceptibly, the château stood between two stands of trees. Its severe, gloomy façade displayed a curtain wall surmounted by a machicolated covered gallery. The curtain wall linked two towers of differing periods, material, height and thickness, the towers ending in crenellations surmounted by a pointed roof, like a bonnet set on top of a Gothic crown.
Here and there barred windows showed in the bare walls. A wide staircase, straight and steep, of twenty two steps, without banisters or parapet, crossed the filled-in moat, in place of the old drawbridge; it led to the doorway of the château, cut in the centre of the façade. Over this doorway one saw the arms of the Lords of Combourg, and the slits through which the beams and chains of the drawbridge once passed. – from Mémoires d’outre-tombe, by François de Chateaubriand