René

Two features matter for a reader of the translation. The first is tense. Most of the frame is told in the past, and so is most of the confession; but at the crises the 1826 text moves into the present: when René weeps at the sight of the Indians (p. 154), when he finds Amélie’s letter (“I go up to her rooms; I knock; no one answers”, p. 169), at the ceremony (pp. 178–181) and on the night of the storm (pp. 186–187). The English follows the French tense for tense, and the notes show where 1802 did otherwise. The second is register. The confession rises into lyric, the frame and the rebuke stay plain, and the translation does not level them. Where the French has a word that carries weight across the book, vague, désert, inquiétude, ennui, the English keeps one rendering throughout, with the few exceptions the Glossary notes; the Key Terms explain why.

On reading this edition

The French of 1826 is on the left, the English on the right, one printed page of the original to each opening. The readings of 1802 are gathered at the foot of the French page, lettered to match small letters in both texts; the explanatory notes stand under the English. The two longest readings of 1802, and two passages of the Génie chapter that the Preface omits, are printed in full in Appendix I; the review of 1802 and the part of the review of 1805 that concerns the stories, both reprinted by Chateaubriand, are in Appendix II. The Editorial Note, at the back of the volume, sets out the conventions in full, and the Outline there follows the argument and the story page by page.

A note on the author

François-René de Chateaubriand was born at Saint-Malo on 4 September 1768, the youngest son of a Breton noble family, and spent part of his youth at the family’s castle of Combourg, where his closest companion was his sister Lucile. He crossed to America in 1791, spent some five months there, and returned to join the émigré army against the Revolution; wounded, he went into exile in London, where he published his Essai sur les révolutions in 1797. The death of his mother in 1798, and of a sister soon after, brought him back to the faith, by his own account. He returned to France in 1800, published Atala in April 1801 and the Génie du Christianisme in April 1802, and became the most celebrated writer in France. He later served the Restoration as ambassador in Berlin, London and Rome, and as minister of foreign affairs (1822–24), and spent his last decades on the Mémoires d’outre-tombe, published after his death in Paris on 4 July 1848.

Readers have long seen Lucile in Amélie, and the château by a lake in the woods of a remote province in Combourg. Chateaubriand’s Mémoires describe his adolescence with Lucile at Combourg in terms that recall René, and Lucile died in 1804, before the edition of 1805; the likeness is suggestive, not a key.