Félicité de la Mennais (it was not till late in life that he gave his name the more democratic form) was born in 1782 at St. Malo; so he, like Chateaubriand, is a Breton; and the obstinacy of his race was innate in his character. The Breton authors constitute what may be called the Vendée of literature; they continue with words the fight which their fathers fought with material weapons.
As a youth Lamennais was slight, thin, and of an excitably lively temperament. At an early age he lost his mother, and after this was even more determined and self-willed than he had been before. His religious vocation was long doubtful; as a youth he devoted much time to music and mathematics, played the flute, and learned the use of various weapons. He fought a serious duel, which proved a hindrance to him in the career which he subsequently chose, had love affairs, and wrote poetry.[1] He was so little inclined to accept the dogmas of Christianity that he did not make his first communion till he was twenty-two, when he had attained to settled religious convictions. After this he began to study theology, and in 1808, at the age of twenty-six, he took the tonsure. But when the time of his ordination as a priest drew near, he was seized with such horror of the vow he was about to take that he again and again postponed the decisive step, and did not really become a priest until he was thirty-five. His letters of these years show the distracted condition of his soul; the proud heart winced and writhed at the thought of giving the power over itself into strange hands. And things were no better when all was over and the irrevocable vow taken. The first letter he wrote to his brother after the dreaded ordination, to which he had finally been persuaded to consent, had actually taken place, gives a gloomy description of his mental condition:
"Although silence has been imposed on me, I believe that it is both allowable and right to let you know once and for all exactly how matters stand with me. I am extremely unhappy, and it is impossible that I can henceforward be anything else. They may reason as they like, may twist and turn things as they please, to persuade me of the opposite, but there is not the slightest probability that they will ever succeed in convincing me of the non-existence of a fact which I perceive. The only consolation I can accept is the cheap counsel to make a virtue of necessity.... All I desire is forgetfulness, in every acceptation of the word. Would to God I could forget myself!"