René

Sauvage. Chateaubriand’s ordinary word for the Indians, and also the adjective “wild”. The translation keeps “savage” in both uses, because the book plays on the two: René “seemed a savage among savages” (p. 139), and the view from the sassafras shows “the contrast of social manners and savage manners” (p. 141). The word is not contemptuous in Chateaubriand. René’s cry “Happy savages!” (p. 154) is an envy, and the savage Chactas is the gentlest figure in the book. The word carries, however, the period’s assumptions, and the translation does not soften them.

Asile and cloître. The book’s argument, according to the Défense, is “the necessity of cloisters for certain misfortunes of life” (p. 12), and the convent is always a refuge, an asile. Amélie writes that she now feels “the need of those refuges” René used to inveigh against (p. 170); on the night of the tempest the monastery is “the refuge that nothing can trouble” (p. 187). The hospices of René’s country are refuges too, “open to the unhappy and the weak” (p. 147). The Défense adds that since the destruction of the monasteries, souls that would once have found a cloister will turn into solitaries, “passionate and philosophical”, given to misanthropy and to death (pp. 13–14). That is René’s case.

Sacrifice. At Amélie’s profession, le sacrifice is two things at once. It is the Mass, which “begins by the light of the torches” and at whose offertory the priest preaches (p. 178), and it is Amélie’s offering of herself to God, “the holocaust” (p. 178), which is “consummated” when she has made her vows (p. 181). Earlier, the word names the execution of Charles I (p. 150). Amélie’s last letter speaks of “the very excess of the sacrifice” as what now gives her peace (p. 185). The translation keeps “sacrifice” in every place, so that the reader can hear the double sense the French intends.

Misère. Chateaubriand distinguishes the word himself, against a critic, in the Preface: misère is not a misfortune that happens to us, an infortune, but the wretchedness of the human condition: the heart’s inability to hold even a grief for long is, he says, “the most complete proof of its sterility, its indigence, its misery” (pp. 6–7). The word belongs to the Christian moralists, above all to Pascal’s misère de l’homme. Father Aubry says it is “one of our great miseries” that “we are not even capable of being unhappy for long” (p. 6), and the chapter of 1802 says the Christian religion was “formed for our miseries and our needs” (Appendix I, no. 1). René’s heart is “kneaded of ennui and misery” (p. 183).