The volume ends with Chateaubriand’s return to France after seven years of exile in England. He recalls playing games on the beaches of Saint-Malo, wandering in the woods near his father’s castle in Combourg, hunting with King Louis XVI at Versailles, witnessing the first heads carried on pikes through the streets of Paris, meeting with George Washington in Philadelphia, and falling hopelessly in love with a young woman named Charlotte in the small Suffolk town of Bungay. He recounts the history of his aristocratic family and the first rumblings of the French Revolution.

Here, in the first books of his massive Memoirs, spanning the years 1768 to 1800, Chateaubriand looks back on the already bygone world of his youth. It’s an incredible book.Written over the course of four decades, François-René de Chateaubriand’s epic autobiography has drawn the admiration of Baudelaire, Flaubert, Proust, Barthes, and Sebald. The old viscount could write one hell of a sentence. May he find comparable honor in our time and our place.' -Algis Valiunas, National Review His eloquence won the regard even of his sworn enemy. 'Chateaubriand’s self-appointed calling was as court historian who held his subject in contempt, ensuring that the truth would out about the monsters who rule the world for a spell.

speak as much to our times as they did to the nineteenth century.' -David Platzer, The New Criterion In these pages, Chateaubriand continues to paint his distinctive self-portrait, in which the whole history of France swirls around the sitter like a mist of dreams. Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 1800–1815-the second volume in Alex Andriesse’s new and complete translation of this epic French classic-is a chronicle of triumphs and sorrows, narrating not only the author’s life during a tumultuous period in European history but the “parallel life” of Napoleon. He served Napoleon in Rome, then resigned in protest after the Duc d’Enghien’s execution, putting his own life at tremendous risk. He strolled the streets of Jerusalem and mapped the ruins of Carthage. He published Atala, René, and The Genius of Christianity to acclaim and epoch-making scandal. Over the next fifteen years, his life was utterly changed. He was thirty-one and had been living as a political refugee in England for most of a decade, at times in such extreme poverty that he subsisted on nothing but hot water and two-penny rolls. In 1800, François-René de Chateaubriand sailed from the cliffs of Dover to the headlands of Calais. The second part of an infamous memoir about life in the time of Napoleon by a rebellious literary celebrity.

Memoirs from beyond the grave 1768 1800