René

Key Terms

These are the words a reader of René is most likely to misread, because each looks like an English word it does not quite mean. Each is kept to one rendering throughout the translation, and the Glossary at the back lists the pages where it matters.

Vague. As an adjective it means what the English word means: indistinct, without clear outline. As a noun, le vague, it names the subject of the whole book. The Génie’s chapter “Du vague des passions” defines it as the state of the soul “that precedes the development of the great passions, when all the faculties, young, active, whole, but shut in, have exercised themselves only on themselves, without aim and without object” (p. 9). It is not vagueness of mind. It is desire that has not found its object, and in the chapter of 1802 it is also what Christianity breeds in a soul it has turned toward another world (Appendix I, no. 1). The English keeps the French word, in italic when it is the noun, because no English word carries both the emptiness and the intensity. It is worth noticing how rarely René himself uses it in the text of 1826. In 1802 he spoke of “this vague disquiet”, of a “vague instinct”, of “the vague of a solitary heart” (pp. 156, 159, 161); the revision removed all three, and in 1826 the word survives in the story only once, in “the vague feeling of misfortune” that the valleys of the monasteries bring to the heart (p. 147). The book’s key word is spoken about René, in the Preface and by his first reviewers (p. 352), much more than by him.

Inquiétude. Not worry, and not anxiety in the modern clinical sense, but restlessness: the incapacity to be at rest. The word descends from the moral vocabulary of the seventeenth century, where inquiétude is the soul’s motion toward what it lacks. René fears that his “endless disquiet” will seem wretched to his listeners (p. 142), and on his return to France he hopes in vain to calm “this disquiet, this ardour of desire that follows me everywhere” (p. 156). The chapter of the Génie makes it the mark of modern man: “the ancients knew little of this secret disquiet” (p. 10). The translation uses “disquiet” throughout, because it keeps the sense of a soul that cannot be still.

Ennui. In René’s mouth ennui is not boredom. It is a weariness of the soul so deep that it becomes the only sign of existence: “I was aware of my existence only through a deep feeling of ennui” (p. 164). It is the state that comes after the vague, when desire has exhausted itself on nothing, and it has something of what the older moralists called acedia. After the ceremony René says that his heart is “kneaded of ennui and misery” (p. 183). The English keeps the French word, which English borrowed with something of this sense. The plural ennuis is different and keeps its classical meaning of troubles or griefs: Amélie hopes marriage will relieve René’s ennuis (p. 171), and a linen band hides “the troubles of her brow” (p. 179).

Rêverie. A reverie, in Chateaubriand, is not a daydream but a mode of feeling in which the soul abandons itself to images and sensations without directing them. It can be enchanted, as when the sound of the native bell plunges René into “enchanted reveries” (p. 144), and it can be dangerous. The Défense calls Rousseau’s reveries “so disastrous and so culpable” and René’s “criminal” and “mad” (pp. 13–14); Father Souël calls them “useless” (p. 189). The book’s whole ambivalence is in the word. The moon is “that orb which feeds reveries” (p. 149), and a dry leaf is enough to feed René’s (p. 162). The word is always rendered “reverie”.

Mélancolie. For Chateaubriand melancholy is not simply sadness. It is a mixed state, “delectable” in memory (p. 144), which “is born of an excess of happiness” among the savages (p. 154), and which, the Génie of 1802 says, is “of a somewhat confused nature” and was the fruit of monastic life (Appendix I, no. 1). It is the emotional colour of the vague, not its cause. René has a “melancholy inclination” (p. 139); the shepherd’s songs are melancholy because “the natural song of man is sad, even when it expresses happiness” (p. 162).

Dégoût. Literally the loss of taste, the turning away of an appetite. René’s is a “disgust with life” that he has felt “since my childhood”, as he says (p. 164), and it is both the root of his wish to die and the reason he cannot rest anywhere. Amélie names it among his faults, “your disgusts, your injustices” (p. 166), and the chapter of the Génie gives it a history: the persecutions of the first Christians “increased in them this disgust with the things of life” (Appendix I, no. 1). The same word describes the saint’s detachment and René’s sickness, and the book depends on the likeness.

Solitude. Solitude is the condition René seeks and the thing that destroys him. He takes “absolute solitude” as his refuge (p. 160) and describes it, when it fails him, as “the last plank on which I had hoped to save myself” (p. 165). Amélie tells him to leave it, “it is not good for you” (p. 171), and Father Souël gives the book’s verdict: “Solitude is bad for him who does not live in it with God” (p. 190). The Défense speaks of “the fatal consequences of an excessive love of solitude” (p. 13). The cloister is solitude lived with God, and the whole story turns on the difference between that solitude and René’s.

Désert. In Chateaubriand, and in French of his time, désert means uninhabited land: forest, prairie, river country, the American wilderness. It never means dry land. René has buried himself “in the wildernesses of Louisiana” (p. 140); Chactas and Souël are “dwellers in the wilderness” (p. 152); the story is told “beneath the tree of the wilderness” (p. 168). The word also turns inward: in the crowds of Paris René finds a “vast wilderness of men” (p. 157), and the passions in a solitary heart sound like the murmur of winds and waters “in the silence of a wilderness” (p. 161). As an adjective, désert means deserted.