René

Note on this Edition

This edition was made from two scans: the University of Toronto copy of the 1826 Œuvres complètes, tome XVI, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France copy of the first edition of the Génie du Christianisme, tome II (1802). Both texts were read from the page images, not from machine-read text, which served only to locate differences for checking. The work was done in blocks of about twelve pages. Each block was transcribed, collated with 1802, translated and annotated, and then checked by reviewers against the images in four separate passes: the page boundaries, the French word by word, the collation with 1802, and the translation against the French, with the facts in the notes. A record of every editorial decision was kept throughout, and each error the checks found was entered there as a class of error, so that the next block could be checked for it.

The checks found no errors in the transcription of the words of René. They found errors of other kinds, and a reader should know what they were. The collation with 1802 was the hardest part to get right. In two blocks the reviewers found differences the transcription had missed (five in all, among them ma route for la route, des anges for les anges, and a pronoun that changes the construction of a sentence), and in almost every block they found translations of 1802 readings that were incomplete, or that rendered a word shared by both texts differently from the main translation, and so suggested a difference that was not in the French. Twice a proper name was misread: René’s wife is Céluta, not Géluta, and the Hebrew prince in the Preface is Amnon, not Ammon. One editorial note said that the 1826 volume gave Atala and René a volume of their own, forgetting Les Aventures du dernier Abencerage in the same tome. All of these have been corrected.

The final reading of the whole volume found faults that no block could have seen, because they lay between blocks. The word dégoût had been rendered “distaste” in the Preface and “disgust” in the story; tempête had been rendered “storm” and “tempest” for the same night’s storm across a page turn; patrie had once become “my own country” on a page where the French uses pays for that phrase. These are now consistent. The same reading checked every cross-reference in the notes against the page it cites, and every one now holds.

Three things remain undone. The separate edition of 1805, in which Chateaubriand first revised René, has not been collated, so a difference between 1802 and 1826 cannot be assigned to one revision or the other; the notes do not attempt to. The modern critical editions of René are in copyright and were not consulted, so this edition’s readings of 1802 have not been compared with theirs. And the Défense du Génie du Christianisme of 1803, from which the Preface quotes, has not been compared with the extract. Readers who need certainty on any of these points should go to those texts.