Page:EB1911 - Volume 05.djvu/999

 derived from the virgin forests and magnificent scenery of the western continent. That he actually lived among the Indians, however, is shown by Bedier to be doubtful, and the same critic has exposed the untrustworthiness of the autobiographical details of his American trip. His knowledge of America was mainly derived from the books of Charlevoix and others.

The news of the arrest of Louis XVI. at Varennes in June 1791 recalled him to France. In 1792 he married Mlle Céleste Buisson de Lavigne, a girl of seventeen, who brought him a small fortune. This enabled him to join the ranks of the emigrants, a course practically imposed on him by his birth and his profession as a soldier. After the failure of the duke of Brunswick’s invasion he contrived to reach Brussels, where he was left wounded and apparently dying in the street. His brother succeeded in obtaining some shelter for him, and sent him to Jersey. The captain of the boat in which he travelled left him on the beach in Guernsey. He was once more rescued from death, this time by some fishermen. After spending some time in the Channel Islands under the care of an emigrant uncle, the comte de Bédée, he made his way to London. In England he lived obscurely for several years, gaining an intimate acquaintance with English literature and a practical acquaintance with poverty. His own account of this period has been exposed by A. le Braz, Au pays d’exil de Chateaubriand (1909), and by E. Dick, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France (1908), i. From his English exile dates the Natchez (first printed in his Œuvres complètes, 1826–1831), a prose epic designed to portray the life of the Red Indians. Two brilliant episodes originally designed for this work, Atala and René, are among his most famous productions. Chateaubriand’s first publication, however, was the ''Essai historique, politique et moral sur les révolutions. . .'' (London, 1797), which the author subsequently retracted, but took care not to suppress. In this volume he appears as a mediator between royalist and revolutionary ideas, a free-thinker in religion, and a philosopher imbued with the spirit of Rousseau. A great change in his views was, however, at hand, induced, according to his own statement, by a letter from his sister Julie (Mme de Farcy), telling him of the grief his views had caused his mother, who had died soon after her release from the Conciergerie in the same year. His brother had perished on the scaffold in April 1794, and both his sisters, Lucile and Julie, and his wife had been imprisoned at Rennes. Mme de Farcy did not long survive her imprisonment.

Chateaubriand’s thoughts turned to religion, and on his return to France in 1800 the Génie du christianisme was already in an advanced state. Louis de Fontanes had been a fellow-exile with Chateaubriand in London, and he now introduced him to the society of Mme de Staël, Mme Récamier, Benjamin Constant, Lucien Bonaparte and others. But Chateaubriand’s favourite resort was the salon of Pauline de Beaumont, who was destined to fill a great place in his life, and gave him some help in the preparation of his work on Christianity, part of the book being written at her house at Savigny. Atala, ou les amours de deux sauvages dans le désert, used as an episode in the Génie du christianisme, appeared separately in 1801 and immediately made his reputation. Exquisite style, impassioned eloquence and glowing descriptions of nature gained indulgence for the incongruity between the rudeness of the personages and the refinement of the sentiments, and for the distasteful blending of prudery with sensuousness. Alike in its merits and defects the piece is a more emphatic and highly coloured Paul et Virginie; it has been justly said that Bernardin Saint-Pierre models in marble and Chateaubriand in bronze. Encouraged by his success the author resumed his Génie du christianisme, ou beautés de la religion chrétienne, which appeared in 1802, just upon the eve of Napoleon’s re-establishment of the Catholic religion in France, for which it thus seemed almost to have prepared the way. No coincidence could have been more opportune, and Chateaubriand came to esteem himself the counterpart of Napoleon in the intellectual order. In composing his work he had borne in mind the admonition of his friend Joseph Joubert, that the public would care very little for his erudition and very much for his eloquence. It is consequently an inefficient production from the point of view of serious argument. The considerations derived from natural theology are but commonplaces rendered dazzling by the magic of style; and the parallels between Christianity and antiquity, especially in arts and letters, are at best ingenious sophistries. The less polemical passages, however, where the author depicts the glories of the Catholic liturgy and its accessories, or expounds its symbolical significance, are splendid instances of the effect produced by the accumulation and judicious distribution of particulars gorgeous in the mass, and treated with the utmost refinement of detail. The work is a masterpiece of literary art, and its influence in French literature was immense. The Éloa of Alfred de Vigny, the Harmonies of Lamartine and even the Légende des siècles of Victor Hugo may be said to have been inspired by the Génie du christianisme. Its immediate effect was very considerable. It admirably subserved the statecraft of Napoleon, and Talleyrand in 1803 appointed the writer attaché to the French legation at Rome, whither he was followed by Mme de Beaumont, who died there.

When his insubordinate and intriguing spirit compelled his recall he was transferred as envoy to the canton of the Valais. The murder of the duke of Enghien (21st of March 1804) took place before he took up this appointment. Chateaubriand, who was in Paris at the time, showed his courage and independence by immediately resigning his post. In 1807 he gave great offence to Napoleon by an article in the Mercure de France (4th of July), containing allusions to Nero which were rightly taken to refer to the emperor. The Mercure, of which he had become proprietor, was temporarily suppressed, and was in the next year amalgamated with the Décade. Chateaubriand states in his Mémoires that his life was threatened, but it is more than possible that he exaggerated the danger. Before this, in 1806, he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, undertaken, as he subsequently acknowledged, less in a devotional spirit than in quest of new imagery. He returned by way of Tunis, Carthage, Cadiz and Granada. At Granada he met Mme de Mouchy, and the place and the meeting apparently suggested the romantic tale of Le Dernier Abencérage, which, for political reasons, remained unprinted until the publication of the &OElig;uvres complètes (1826–1831). The journey also produced L’Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem ... (3 vols., 1811), a record of travel distinguished by the writer’s habitual picturesqueness; and inspired his prose epic, Les Martyrs, ou le triomphe de la religion chrétienne (2 vols., 1809). This work may be regarded as the argument of the Génie du christianisme thrown into an objective form. As in the Epicurean of Thomas Moore, the professed design is the contrast between Paganism and Christianity, which fails of its purpose partly from the absence of real insight into the genius of antiquity, and partly because the heathen are the most interesting characters after all. René had appeared in 1802 as an episode of the Génie du christianisme, and was published separately at Leipzig without its author’s consent in the same year. It was perhaps Chateaubriand’s most characteristic production. The connecting link in European literature between Werther and Childe Harold, it paints the misery of a morbid and dissatisfied soul. The representation is mainly from the life. Chateaubriand betrayed amazing egotism in describing his sister Lucile in the Amélie of the story, and much is obviously descriptive of his own early surroundings. With Les Natchez his career as an imaginative writer is closed. In 1831 he published his Études ou discours historiques. . . (4 vols.) dealing with the fall of the Roman Empire.

As a politician Chateaubriand was equally formidable to his antagonists when in opposition and to his friends when in office. His poetical receptivity and impressionableness rendered him no doubt honestly inconsistent with himself; his vanity and ambition, too morbidly acute to be restrained by the ties of party allegiance, made him dangerous and untrustworthy as a political associate. He was forbidden to deliver the address he had prepared (1811) for his reception to the Academy on M. J. Chénier on account of the bitter allusions to Napoleon contained in it. From this date until 1814 Chateaubriand lived in seclusion at