Combourg, a magical filiation....
It must be admitted that the French love to bicker, argue, polemic... and, since we are in Brittany, here is a nice argument, which is still going on nowadays, of course...
The mythical forest of Brocéliande, that of the fairy Viviane, Merlin the enchanter and King Arthur is generally, very generally, indicated as the current forest of Pimpont.
Yes, but here it is...
others claim that it is located in a triangle-shaped area between Saint Malo, Mont-Saint-Michel, and Rennes. In this area, a vast circular space of about 40 kilometres in diameter, the centre of which is... Combourg. If you want to know more, you will find on the Internet the traces of the furious scholarly battles, documented with more or less happiness or good faith, that the defenders of one or the other thesis are engaged in.
Here, however, is the castle of Combourg installed in a magical filiation!
From Du Guesclin to Chateaubriand....
Built in the 11th century, the castle belonged to the du Guesclin family. Finally, from hand to hand, it arrived at the Chateaubriand family. And this is how the writer and politician François René de Chateaubriand spent part of his childhood there. And so it is automatically referred to as the cradle of romanticism.
But, still, it wasn't very gay! In his "Memoirs from beyond the grave", here is what Chateaubriand himself said about it:
« Owls fluttering from tower to tower, passing through and back again between the moon and me, drew on my curtains the moving shadow of their wings. Relegated to the most deserted place, at the opening of the galleries, I did not lose a whisper of darkness. Sometimes the wind seemed to run lightly; sometimes it let complaints escape; all of a sudden, my door was shaken violently, the underground was roaring, then its sounds expired to start again. At four in the morning, the voice of the master of the castle calling the valet at the entrance to the secular vaults was heard as the voice of the last ghost of the night ».
We can see here described something that looks very similar to ghostly acts....
Did the Count of Combourg have a wooden leg?
It must be said that Chateaubriand's father himself, who slept in the "red room", reported that the inhabitants of the surrounding area said that the Count of Combourg, who had died three centuries earlier, came back at regular intervals, and that his wooden leg could be heard very clearly on the ground.
And where does it happen? In the famous "Red Room"!
Did the Count of Combourg have a cat?
The Chateaubriand were definitely extremely phlegmatic, or deaf!
If the father slept in the "red room" while endured the walks from the ghost to the wooden leg, without worrying about it more than that, his son, the writer, slept in a room near the "Cat Tower", so called because the ghost was sometimes accompanied by a cat, black obviously, and whose meows were heard, evil obviously.
And this cat, many people are certain to see it as a mummified cat exposed in a window placed... in the very room that Chateaubriand, as a child, occupied.
And where did this cat come from?
During major restoration work, it was discovered, walled up, behind a large 16th century beam.
From there to immediately give substance to the legend of the ghost cat, there is not the thickness of a cat mustache hair!
Combourg Castle
23, Rue des Princes
35270 Combourg
Tél. : 02 99 73 22 95
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator
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