It is night. On the balcony, the air contains the mixture of freshness and warmth of the month of May, the prologue of summer. I water my little pots and watch the snail that my grandson Lluc hunted. He feeds on flowers. He lives on this balcony more comfortably than a king in his palace. Then, sitting in my old wing chair (he is 42 years old, irreplaceable), I open the imposing Cliff edition of Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'outre-tombe, one of the great books I had not yet read. I tried it years ago, with a French edition bought in the immense second-hand bookstore in Le Somail, a small port on the Canal du Midi, a few kilometers from Narbonne. But I didn't get it because Chateaubriand has a very rich Frenchman, beyond my strength.

The first chapters are dedicated to childhood. The son of a very watered-down nobility, used to the beaches and tides of Brittany since childhood, a mischievous raptor in Saint-Malo, captivated by the forests of Combourg, he spends a few years in a boarding school in Dol and then in Rennes. He enters the Brest naval academy, but abandons it to devote himself to study and reading at his own risk. She lives with her parents and her sister in the Château de Combourg, which can now be visited. He is reputed to be the most beautiful in Brittany, but he describes it as a gloomy, stark and empty place. Before going to bed, little Chateaubriand sniffs around the corners in search of ghosts, because, according to what is said in the country, the ghost of an earl of three centuries ago haunts the castle with a wooden leg and a black cat.

I lift my head from the book imagining little Chateaubriand with the face of my oldest grandson, Lluc, who, like the writer, has black hair, large, pensive eyes, and enthusiastic curiosity. He just turned six years old. He will be pained by the story of an Alan told by Chateaubriand. Condemned to die for having bitten a nobleman and realizing that the servant, crying, gave him poisoned meat, the dog did not want to eat more. He starved to death. Dogs, too, the writer recalls, are punished for his loyalty. I will tell Lluc a couple of things about the formation of the Chateaubriand boy's character that may interest him. He was passionate about everything: hunting and running, reading and writing. "Even today I am indifferent to talk about the most trivial things or the highest matters." And he sentences: "No defect bothers me, except the eagerness to make fun and sufficiency, which I have a hard time not challenging."

When Chateaubriand enters the Dol boarding school, he realizes that there are small groups there. He despises them. "I hate protectors." In the games "I did not intend to command, but I did not intend to be commanded either: I was not worth being a tyrant or a slave, and that is how I have continued to be." Freedom is expensive; however, the enjoyment of personal independence cannot be prevented by the very rich or the strongest. The writer took his sense of freedom to the extreme and some of the scenes he evokes in his memoirs show that he was a victim of arrogance. However, he already cultivated in adolescence a virtue now considered obsolete, which I would like to explain to my grandson. The honor. "This exaltation of the soul that keeps the heart incorruptible in the midst of corruption." A repairing principle, very demanding, "inexhaustible source of the wonders that love asks of youth and of the sacrifices it imposes". Today we would need to melt three metals to forge honor: honesty, dignity, coherence.