“ Chateaubriand, who was in Paris at the time, showed his courage and independence by immediately resigning his post. In 1807 he gave great offence to Napoleon by an article in the Mercure de France (4th of July) , containing allusions to Nero which were rightly taken to refer to the emperor. The Mercure, of which he had become proprietor, was temporarily suppressed, and was in the next year amalgamated with the Décade. Chateaubriand states in his Mémoires that his life was threatened, but it is more than possible that he exaggerated the danger. ”

“ From this date until 1814 Chateaubriand lived in seclusion at the Vallée-aux-loups, an estate he had bought in 1807 at Aulnay. His pamphlet De Bonaparte, des Bourbons, et de la nécessité de se rattier à nos princes légitimes, published on the 31st of March 1814, the day of the entrance of the allies into Paris, was as opportune in the moment of its appearance as the Génie du christianisme, and produced a hardly less signal effect. Louis XVIII. declared that it had been worth a hundred thousand men to him. ”

“ He was buried in the Grand Bé, an islet in the bay of St Malo. Shortly after his death his memory was revived, and at the same time exposed to much adverse criticism, by the publication, with sundry mutilations as has been suspected, of his celebrated Mémoires d’outre-tombe (12 vols., 1849–1850) . These memoirs undoubtedly reveal his vanity, his egotism, the frequent hollowness of his professed convictions, and his incapacity for sincere attachment, except, perhaps, in the case of Madame Récamier. ”

“ CHATEAUBRIAND, FRANÇOIS RENÉ, Vicomte de (1768–1848) , French author, youngest son of René Auguste de Chateaubriand, comte de Combourg, [1] was born at St Malo on the 4th of September 1768. He was a brilliant representative of the reaction against the ideas of the French Revolution, and the most conspicuous figure in French literature during the First Empire. ”

“ The considerations derived from natural theology are but commonplaces rendered dazzling by the magic of style; and the parallels between Christianity and antiquity, especially in arts and letters, are at best ingenious sophistries. ”

“ A. Vinet, Études sur la litt. française au XIXe siècle (1849) ; M. de Lescure, Chateaubriand (1892) in the Grands écrivains français; Émile Faguet, Études littéraires sur le XIXe siècle (1887) ; and Essai d’une bio-bibliographie de Chateaubriand et de sa famille (Vannes, 1896) , by René Kerviler. Joseph Bedier, in Études critiques (1903) , deals with the American writings. Some correspondence with Sainte-Beuve was edited by Louis Thomas in 1904, and some letters to Mme de Staël appeared in the Revue des deux mondes (Oct. 1903) . ”