René

Introduction

The book

René is a short book with a long history. It fills fifty-four pages of the volume printed here, and it first appeared in April 1802, not on its own, but inside another book. Chateaubriand had written it as a story of the Natchez of Louisiana, part of the vast prose epic of Indian life, Les Natchez, that he had written in exile and left behind in London when he came home in 1800, and he then set it into the Génie du Christianisme, his defence of the Christian religion, as an example. In the Génie of 1802 it stands as the fourth book of the second part, the “Poétique du christianisme”, immediately after a short chapter called “Du vague des passions”, “On the Vague of the Passions”. The chapter describes a state of mind; René was to show it in a life.

Three years later, in 1805, Chateaubriand printed René for the first time apart from the Génie, in one small volume with Atala, and wrote the Preface that stands at the head of this edition. In 1826 he gathered both stories into the sixteenth volume of his Œuvres complètes, with that Preface, the story as he had last revised it, and a set of “Notes et critiques” in which he reprinted what the reviewers had said. That volume is the text of this edition. Its readings are compared throughout with the first edition of 1802, so that a reader can see, at the foot of the page, what the book said before Chateaubriand revised it.

The story itself is simple to tell and difficult to judge. A young Frenchman called René has come to Louisiana in 1725 and been adopted by the blind old Natchez chief Chactas, the hero of Atala. He lives apart, sad and silent, until a letter from Europe deepens his sadness so much that Chactas and the missionary Father Souël press him to explain himself. At dawn, under a sassafras on the bank of the Mississippi, he tells them, not the adventures of his life, “for he had met with none”, but “the secret feelings of his soul” (p. 140). He tells of a lonely childhood in a château in a remote province, of his closeness to his sister Amélie, of his father’s death, of travels among ruins and poets, of a return to a Paris he could not bear, of a life in a cottage where solitude filled him with a longing that had no object, and of a resolve to kill himself. Amélie, guessing it, comes to him, makes him swear to live, for a time restores him, and then flees into a convent. At her profession, lying beneath the pall, she whispers a prayer that only René hears, and it tells him that she has loved him with a “criminal passion” (p. 180). He sails for America. There his story ends, and he hands Father Souël a letter from the superior of Amélie’s convent: she has died nursing her sisters, stricken by a contagious disease; Father Souël rebukes René sternly; Chactas tells a parable of a stream that would not stay in its bed; and a last paragraph says that René died soon afterwards in the massacre of the French and the Natchez.

Two frames that pull apart

The first thing this edition makes visible is that the book has two frames, and that they do not say the same thing. The chapter “Du vague des passions” is printed in the Preface, pp. 9–11, as Chateaubriand quoted it in 1805. What it describes is a condition of the modern soul: the faculties “young, active, whole, but shut in”, exercised “without aim and without object”; a mind made “skilled without experience” by books; a state in which “with a full heart one inhabits an empty world” and “without having used anything, one is disillusioned with everything” (p. 9). As the Preface prints it, the chapter blames civilization, the modern habit of reading, and the influence of women on men’s passions.

In 1802 it did not stop there. At the point where the Preface prints five dots (p. 10), the chapter of 1802 went on for two more paragraphs, which Appendix I prints in full, and these give a different and much larger cause. “It is in the genius of Christianity above all,” the chapter said, “that we must look for the reason of this vague of the feelings spread among modern men.” The Christian religion sets before the believer “the double picture of the sorrows of earth and the joys of heaven”, and so “makes in the heart a spring of present ills and distant hopes, from which flow inexhaustible reveries”. The monasteries that rose everywhere after the barbarian invasions bred “a prodigious melancholy”. The vague of the passions, in other words, was not an illness Christianity came to cure. It was something Christianity itself had made, by turning the soul toward another world. That is a bold thing for an apologist to write. It is also the key to the book’s peculiar tone, in which René’s longing is at once his sickness and the sign of a soul too large for the earth.

The Preface cuts exactly those two paragraphs. It cuts, too, the end of the chapter, where René’s story was called “so to speak, only a thought”, “the painting of the vague of the passions, with no admixture of adventures, save one misfortune, which, without producing remarkable events, serves only to redouble René’s melancholy and to punish him” (Appendix I, no. 2). In place of that ending it prints “etc., etc.”, and follows it with an extract from the Défense du Génie du Christianisme of 1803, which reads the story quite differently. The punishment was there in 1802; what has changed is what René is punished for. In the Défense the vague has a culprit, and he is not Christianity but Rousseau, “who first introduced among us these reveries, so disastrous and so culpable”, and after him Goethe’s Werther (p. 13). The story is now a warning against “the particular failing of the young men of the age, the failing that leads directly to suicide”, and the incest at its heart is the punishment itself, chosen, the Défense says, from “those dreadful misfortunes that belong less to the individual than to the family of man” (p. 14).