René

Outline

The divisions follow the argument and the story. Page numbers are those of the 1826 volume, which stand in the running heads of both texts.

Preface to Atala and René (pp. 1–16)

pp. 1–2. Occasion. The edition of 1805 answers two publics: teachers wanted a Génie without the parts meant for worldly readers, and others wanted the two episodes printed apart.

pp. 2–3. The Génie left as it stands. Out of regard for its buyers, and because the critics contradict one another, Chateaubriand will not yet revise the Génie; a note of 1826 says the revision has now been made.

pp. 3–4. Atala revised. Eleven editions, no two alike; the twelfth, revised with “friends quick to censure me”, is the only Atala he will acknowledge.

pp. 5–7. The critics answered. Father Aubry’s hard sayings, on how soon the dead are forgotten and how grief must end, are defended against the abbé Morellet, with the distinction between infortune and misère.

pp. 7–8. American nature. The drunken bears and the travellers who vouch for them; Atala’s success in America.

pp. 8–9. René introduced. Not yet printed apart; the same places and people as Atala, but another order of feeling.

pp. 9–11. Extract from the Génie, “Du vague des passions”. The state of the soul before the passions have found their object; the ancients hardly knew it; modern life and the society of women breed it. At the five points the extract cuts the chapter’s account of Christianity as the source of the vague (Appendix I, no. 1).

pp. 11–15. Extract from the Défense. The episodes as bait for unbelievers; René as an attack on the reveries that lead to suicide, begun by Rousseau and Werther; incest chosen as the punishment, after Phaedra, Thyestes and Amnon; the story judged by its impression, in which Amélie dies healed and René wretched.

pp. 15–16. Close. René revised with as much care as Atala.

René (pp. 137–192)

pp. 139–142. The frame. René among the Natchez, his wife he does not live with, his two old friends; a letter from Europe; the dawn meeting under the sassafras, with the village, the colony and the river laid out before them. René begins: “I cannot, in beginning my story, keep back a movement of shame.”

pp. 142–145. Childhood. Born at the cost of his mother’s life, brought up among strangers, uneven in temper; autumns at the château with Amélie; the bells of the native village.

pp. 145–148. Death of the father. The first sight of death and the first certainty of immortality; the house given up; Amélie speaks of the religious life; the monastery and its cloister under the moon; the decision to travel, and Amélie’s strange joy at his going.

pp. 148–153. The travels. The ruins of Rome and Greece; the statue in London that points to the place of a king’s execution; the last bard of Caledonia; the churches of Italy; nothing certain among the ancients, nothing beautiful among the moderns; the sunrise from Etna, “a creation at once immense and imperceptible, and an abyss open at my side”.

pp. 153–155. The confession interrupted. René falls silent, weeps at the sight of Indians crossing the plain, and cries “Happy savages!”; Chactas calls him “my son” and asks to hear of France.

pp. 155–160. The return. France changed since Louis XIV; Amélie avoids him; he makes his life smaller to fit the world, and withdraws; the faubourg, the empty church, the bridges at sunset, the hour striking from church to church; the flight to a cottage in the country.

pp. 160–164. The vague. The superabundance of life that finds no object; the willow leaves; the autumn storms and the birds of passage; the voice that says his migration has not yet come; the prayer for an Eve drawn from himself; the ennui in which he is aware of existence only as weariness.

pp. 164–166. The resolve to die. “I was full of religion, and I reasoned like an unbeliever”; the last plank sinks; the letter to Amélie about his affairs.

pp. 166–169. Amélie. She comes without warning, makes him swear to live, and for a time restores him; then she wastes, prays at the crucifix, and one morning is gone.

pp. 169–173. Her letter. The religious life she has always wished for; the need of refuges from certain misfortunes; marriage recommended to him; the convent by the sea; the childhood they shared; the deed of gift.

pp. 173–176. The journey to B….. René’s conjectures; the old estate on the way, the empty château, the rooms of his mother’s death and his father’s retreat; the family of man “lasts but a day”.

pp. 176–181. The profession. The refusal to see him, the request that he act as father; the crowd, the grille, Amélie in the pomps of the world; the sermon, the scissors, the veil; the Office of the Dead over her beneath the pall; the whispered prayer; René’s cry, the grille closed, René carried out.

pp. 181–183. Aftermath. The secret understood; grief at last real, and so bearable; the resolve to leave for America.

pp. 183–187. Departure. Waiting in port by the convent; the nun at the barred window; Amélie’s letter of peace; the night of the tempest, the guns of distress and the monastery bell; the coast receding.

p. 188. The superior’s letter. Amélie has died nursing her sisters.

pp. 188–191. The answers. Chactas weeps and wishes for Father Aubry; Father Souël’s rebuke: “Solitude is bad for him who does not live in it with God”; Chactas’s parable of the stream that would not stay in its bed.

pp. 191–192. Ending. The flamingo foretells a storm; René returns to his wife without finding happiness and dies in the massacre; a rock is still shown where he used to sit at sunset.

Appendix II: two reviews (pp. 351–358)

pp. 351–354. Mercure, 5 May 1802. A summary of the story, keyed to the pages of this volume; praise of the letters and the château; the moral aimed at the victims of Werther and Rousseau.

pp. 354–358. Mercure, 20 July 1805. A review of the edition of 1805: the episodes as bait for a corrupt age; the danger of their charm redeemed by their ending; the revisions welcomed; Father Aubry and Father Souël as proofs of the Génie’s doctrine.