Chateaubriand

The second part of an infamous memoir about life in the time of Napoleon by a rebellious literary celebrity. In 1800, François-René de Chateaubriand sailed from the cliffs of Dover to the headlands of Calais. He was thirty-one and had been living as a political refugee in England for most of a decade, at times in such extreme poverty that he subsisted on nothing but hot water and two-penny rolls. Over the next fifteen years, his life was utterly changed. He published Atala, René, and The Genius of Christianity to acclaim and epoch-making scandal. He strolled the streets of Jerusalem and mapped the ruins of Carthage. He served Napoleon in Rome, then resigned in protest after the Duc d’Enghien’s execution, putting his own life at tremendous risk. Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 1800–1815—the second volume in Alex Andriesse’s new and complete translation of this epic French classic—is a chronicle of triumphs and sorrows, narrating not only the author’s life during a tumultuous period in European history but the “parallel life” of Napoleon. In these pages, Chateaubriand continues to paint his distinctive self-portrait, in which the whole history of France swirls around the sitter like a mist of dreams.

If the writings of Chateaubriand, one above all is both most representative of its author and most significant for reader and student alike. René, a milestone of literature, presents the first genuine and complete picture of that state of spiritual frustration and moral isolation known as le mal du siècle, its causes, symptoms, ravages, and cure. Chateaubriand, a prodigious artist with an incomparable style, enjoys the further distinction of having fused in his work the end of one epoch and the beginning of another. It is sometimes forgotten that these epochs are not only French but also European in scope, and their reverberations as expressed by Chateaubriand have affected almost every subsequent writer of importance up to the present. Chateaubriand is often called the father of romanticism. It may be claimed with equal reason that he is the grandfather of the neo-romanticism of our time. This edition of René contains, as well as a full introduction, notes covering the allusions to place names, events, and personages, and a complete vocabulary.

Chateaubriand's Travels in America, presented here in its first modern translation, was a reflection of the attitudes of his epoch toward the New World. And at the same time, because of his enormous literary reputation, it has continued to be a major source of European impressions about America. The America portrayed by Chateaubriand was much more a product of his reading and his imagination than of his actual visit. (His supposed itinerary included a trip up the Hudson to Albany, a visit to Niagara Falls via the Mohawk Trail, a trip down the Mississippi to the Natchez country, and even a visit to the Carolinas and the southern tip of Florida). Though the Frenchman of the nineteenth century could have obtained a much truer picture of America in any number of realistic works, he still chose the poetic evocation of Chateaubriand because he shared the same temperament, the same prejudices, and the same particular view of the world.

Reproduction of the original: The Memoirs of René Vicomte de Chateaubriand sometime Ambassador to England by Francois René Chateaubriand