René

This was not a reading Chateaubriand invented under pressure. A review of René printed in the Mercure three weeks after the Génie appeared, and reprinted in Appendix II, already found its moral “altogether new” and aimed at “those many victims of the example of young Werther, and of Rousseau” (p. 353). But the two frames make different books. Read through the chapter of 1802, René is a painting of a state of soul that Christianity itself had bred, punished by one misfortune, and its longing is a kind of truth. Read through the Preface of 1805, it is a case history of a modern vice with a moral attached, and its longing is the vice. Chateaubriand never chose between them, and this edition prints both.

What the revision did

The second thing the edition makes visible is the revision itself. There are more than two hundred places where the text of 1802 differs from that of 1826, and they are not random. Most are the stylistic tightening the Preface promises: epithets removed, sentences shortened, “the style, freed of the epithets that encumbered it”, as Chateaubriand says of Atala (p. 4). Some, though, go further, and three patterns stand out.

The first is the removal of the word that named the book’s subject. In 1802 René speaks of “this vague disquiet” (p. 156), of the “vague instinct” of the unknown good that pursues him (p. 159), and of the sounds the passions give out “in the vague of a solitary heart” (p. 161). All three are gone in 1826; the last becomes “the void”. Only one vague remains in the whole story, the “vague feeling of misfortune” that the valleys of the monasteries bring to the heart (p. 147). The programmatic word of the Génie’s chapter, in short, has been all but withdrawn from René’s own mouth.

The second is the removal of “philosophy”. In 1802 the bells of the native village call up “philosophy, piety, tenderness”; in 1826 they call up “religion, family, homeland” (p. 144). In 1802 the tombs of the monks fill René’s heart “with melancholy philosophy”; in 1826, “with disgust for the earth” (p. 148). In 1802 the happy savages reach “the goal of philosophy”; in 1826, “the goal of wisdom” (p. 154). “Philosophy” was the word of the Enlightenment that the Génie was written against, and in each case the revision puts a Christian or a traditional word in its place.

The third is a veiling of the incest. The story of 1826 never says outright what Amélie felt. It lets her prayer from beneath the pall say it, and then lets René reconstruct her conduct in a few sentences (pp. 181–182). The story of 1802 said more. Her answer to René’s letter closed with a confession: “it is you alone I have loved: my friend, God does not approve such preferences…” (Appendix I, no. 3); and after the ceremony René dwelt on “all that she must have suffered at my side”, on the struggles in her breast, on his own “most innocent caresses”, and on the discovery, rereading her letter, that “her moist lips had left other traces on it than those of her tears” (Appendix I, no. 4). All of this is gone in 1826. A single change of gender points the same way: in 1802 René wished that he could have shared his raptures with “another” person, in the masculine; in 1826, with “another” woman (p. 163).

Some of it may be the work of 1805: Chateaubriand says in the Preface, written that year, that René “has been revised with as much care as Atala” (p. 16).

The story’s structure

The story is built as a confession inside a frame, and the frame is not a mere container. The opening pages (pp. 139–142) set the scene with great exactness: the date, the twenty-first of “the moon of flowers”; the place, a sassafras on the bank of the river; the view, with the Natchez village on one side and the French fort, “clearings covered with Negroes”, on the other, “the contrast of social manners and savage manners” in a small space. The two listeners are chosen to answer René from opposite sides. Chactas, a savage who has seen the France of Louis XIV, holds René’s heart “by a kindly indulgence”; Souël, a priest, holds it “by an extreme severity” (p. 140).

René’s confession falls into three movements. The first (pp. 142–164) is a history of the vague itself: childhood, bereavement, the temptation of the cloister, the travels, the return, the retreat to the cottage and the autumn storms, ending in the extraordinary pages on the “superabundance of life” that finds no object (pp. 160–164). The second (pp. 164–183) is the one event of the book: the resolve to die, Amélie’s coming, her flight, her letter, the ceremony and the confession. The third (pp. 183–187) is the waiting in port, the night of the tempest when the monastery bell tolls over the guns of ships in distress, and the departure. Twice the confession breaks down: René falls silent after the vision on Etna (p. 153), and again after weeping over the happy Indians crossing the plain, when Chactas calls him back with “My son! my dear son!” (p. 154). And the frame closes with two answers of unequal length. Souël’s rebuke takes a page and a half (pp. 189–190); Chactas’s parable of the stream that asked “snows of the mountains, waters of the torrents, rains of the tempests” takes half a page (p. 191). Against them stand forty pages of reverie.

The manner

Chateaubriand’s prose is built for the ear. Its sentences are long and held in suspense, then released into a short one: “He died in my arms. I learned to know death on the lips of him who had given me life. The impression was great; it lasts still” (p. 145). It likes triads, the bells that call up “religion, family, homeland, and the cradle and the tomb, and the past and the future” (pp. 144–145). It turns from narrative to apostrophe without warning, to the “illusions of childhood and of home” (p. 143), to the “longed-for storms” (p. 163), to God. Its images are large and exact at once: the sun setting over Paris like “the pendulum of the clock of the ages” (p. 158), the moon furrowing the clouds “like a pale ship ploughing the waves” (p. 163), René on Etna with “a creation at once immense and imperceptible” before him “and an abyss open at my side” (p. 153).