[In the following essay, Porter examines Chateaubriand's interest in a literary return to classicism, based on French and ancient traditions. Porter asserts that Chateaubriand believed that classicism, with rules and principles which could be discovered and followed, offers a timelessness for art. To this end, Chateaubriand offered his own works as models, including René and Atala.]

“The Génie du christianisme will remain my great work,” Chateaubriand wrote in the Mémoires d'outre-tombe, “because it produced or determined a revolution and began the new era of the literary century.” But the Martyrs, he continued, a work demonstrating “serious studies, a labor of style, great respect for language and good taste,” was something else again: it had kept a flavor of the places it was concerned with—the lands of antiquity; in it “the classical dominates the romantic.” The commonplaces of literary history must not blind us to this “classicism” of the “father of romanticism.” “Let us forget about the portrait of the inspired poet, his hair blowing in the wind,” Pierre Moreau wrote in Le Classicisme des romantiques: “we must picture him surrounded by books, pen in hand; it is in books that he looks for the image of even the landscape before his eyes: he makes extracts, compiles; is he tempted by the fame of the poet or the reputation of the scholar?” We may well ask what is Chateaubriand's classicism, what is a “modern soul in classical forms,” what is “romantic inspiration with classical execution”—to use some of the formulas scholars have imagined to cope with him.

What is most classical about Chateaubriand in the context of French classicism is his firm belief that there are rules and principles to be sought out, developed, and followed. In one of his earliest works, the “Lettre sur l'art du dessin dans les paysages” dated from London, 1795, he pictured a young man, inspired by a waterfall, trying to paint it: “Now he realizes that there are principles he does not know; he is forced to agree that he needs a master.” The writer's masters will be the great writers of the past: Chateaubriand will imitate them (“The original writer is not the one who does not imitate anybody, but the one whom nobody can imitate” [Génie du christianisme, II, i, 3], and “In France the mania of imitation took away perhaps from the age of Louis XIV a regrettable originality: happily Racine, Boileau, Bossuet, Fénelon having only studied the Greeks and Latins, the genius of the great king and the genius of Rome and Athens were joined; there resulted from this high alliance works which had models and will forever serve as models” [Essai sur la littérature anglaise]). If parts of the Génie du christianisme are defective, it is because “in 1800 I did not know the arts: I had seen neither Italy nor Greece nor Egypt” (Mémoires d'outre-tombe, Book XIII, Ch. 11). He defends his right to imitate by his models' having done the same (“This art of laying hold of the beauties of another time to arrange them to the taste of one's own was particularly known by the poet of Mantua” [Génie, II, i, 3]).

With a great deal of hard work—of which he was very proud—Chateaubriand seizes hold of many beauties. A great admirer of Racine, he tried to rival him with a play in that prime form of French neo-classical genres, the five-act tragedy in verse; his choice of subject, Moïse, was certainly no more “romantic” than Athalie. The new, glowing colors of Atala do not blind us to all that is neo-classical in the “philosophical” use for which it was intended in the Génie du christianisme. Atala is itself in form strikingly like that great stepchild of French classicism, the “roman philosophique.” His love for classical antiquity led him also to literary forms far more ancient than those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; behind his completed epic tale of the Martyrs lay another epic, one of his first literary ambitions—and the modern subject of the Natchez is no more significant than are the Homeric and Virgilian imitations present in all its images and episodes.

In style as in genre Chateaubriand consistently showed his desire to maintain and indeed return to many aspects of the purest French classical prose. Although his archaisms of vocabulary and syntax, seen often in corrections of detail, correspond primarily to the desire for an emotionally charged flavor of age (Jean Mourot's pages on this subject in Rythme et sonorité dans les ‘Mémoires d'outre-tombe’ are instructive), they are as indicative as his consistent critical admiration for the literary art of Bossuet and Racine. At the worst—just as Sainte-Beuve with much justification found the beginning of the Martyrs infused with “obligatory epic apparatus … imitated, translated, pastiche [though] with talent”—Chateaubriand was capable of a pseudo-classical style in the ancient sense of classical (at least in his early works) of merely antiquarian interest. “Let's try to translate this verse [from the book of Ruth] into Homeric style,” he writes at one moment in the Génie du christianisme (II, v, 4): the results are such that it is no wonder that he uses them in demonstrating the superiority of the artistic tradition of Christendom! Yet at the same time he finds in ancient as in French classicism (Moreau, again, points it out) the meaning of serious art and a noble style:

The thoughts of the Livys and the Bossuets are rich and linked together: each word of theirs is born from the preceding one and becomes the seed of the word which follows. Great rivers (if we may use this image) do not flow in bounds, by intervals, and in a straight line: they lead deliberately forth from their sources a stream incessantly swelling; their turnings are wide in the plains; in their immense orbs they embrace towns and forests and carry to the ever greater Ocean water capable of filling its chasms.

(Génie du christianisme, III, iii, 3)

The political ultra-conservatism Chateaubriand long preached may be found ultimately consistent with his protestations of classical literary faith. But these latter expressions are of particular concern to us: through their force we come to see that the apparatus and imposed style of many of the early works come from something deeper than mere prejudice on the part of the writer; we can begin to spot the place where theory and sensitivity come together to form conviction and persuade of sincerity: it is here that we will begin to see how the mature writer of the Mémoires d'outre-tombe and the Vie de Rancé in this one aspect, as in many others, is the perfectly to be expected successor of the poet of Atala, René, and the Natchez.

Sainte-Beuve admired Chateaubriand's success at imitation in a work where we too may best seek it: in Atala, where with the exception of a small measure of epic parody there is an incontestable epic fullness. The grandeur of the vistas of savage beauty in the Natchez cycle (René, Atala, and the Natchez), of the harmonies of perspective and moral tone in the Martyrs or the descriptions of the campagne romaine, are responsible for its “classical” authority and universality.

There is a certain labor of time that gives to human things the principle of existence that they do not have in themselves; men cease to be and are nothing by themselves, but their lives placed end to end, their tombs arranged in a file, form a chain whose strength increases in proportion to its length …

(Etudes historiques)

This kind of thinking in regard to the lessons of history controls Chateaubriand's attitude toward conformity with the great literary tradition, and it may be seen in many ways. Best known are his trip to America whose least controversial cause would seem to be the discovery of “true colors” in which to paint the “epic of the man of Nature,” and his trip to the Orient to gather on the spot observations for the Martyrs: “M. de Chateaubriand has decided to make a rapid trip to Greece, in order to paint its sites with more truth in the new book he is working on” (from a letter of introduction from a former French ambassador to Constantinople which Chateaubriand carried in 1806). And Chateaubriand is not reticent in self-praise about this aspect of his labors, as we witness (with its curious reminiscence of Saint Paul) in the Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem:

When I have been seen tearing myself away from country and friends, undergoing fever and fatigue, crossing the seas of Greece in little boats, being shot at by Bedouins, and all of that through respect for the public in order to give that public a book less imperfect than the Génie du christianisme, certainly I hope that people will be somewhat grateful to me for my pains.

Or in a note to a battle scene of the Martyrs:

The reader may account for the pleasure which this combat of the Franks and Romans may have given him [how badly the esthetic principle at play shows itself in this curious phrasing]. Those who run through a work apparently of pure imagination in several hours, do not suspect the time and trouble it has cost the author, when he is made as he should be, that is, of conscience. Vergil took a great many years to assemble the materials of the Aeneid and he still found that he had not read enough … Today people write who hardly know their language and when they know almost nothing … In this battle of the Franks, where nothing was seen but a brilliant description, now one will know [after many erudite references in preceding notes] that there is not a single word which may not be considered as an historical fact.

But we see the same respect for the old traditions, forms, and monuments in other, perhaps more telling, little ways: “One should travel through the Holy Land Bible and Gospel in hand … What would you say of a man travelling through Greece and Italy who did nothing but contradict Homer and Vergil?” (Itinéraire). The historian must consult the original documents: “Looking up facts in handy editions is not everything: you must see with your own eyes what might be named the physiognomy of the times: documents the hands of Charlemagne and Saint Louis have touched, the outside form of charts, papyrus, parchment, ink, handwriting, seals, vignettes; in short you must handle the centuries and breathe their dust. Then, like a traveller to unknown realms, you return with dairy written on the spot and a portfolio filled with designs from nature” (Preface to Etudes historiques).

Indeed, as he says in the Preface to the first edition of Atala concerning his difficulty in sustaining the complete dramatic interest among two and three actors by the force of the dialogue as in a Greek play: “One should always be grateful to a writer who tries to recall literature to this ancient taste [“ce goût antique”] too much forgotten in our days.”

It is in accord with this sincere, if unnecessarily ostentatious, admiration for the classical in both the ancient and the French traditions that we should understand Chateaubriand's own claims about his role in the literary movements of his day. The notion of restraint which literary historians consider a prime factor in “classical” art applies particularly well to Chateaubriand's understanding of how he created his work, the classical “dominating” the romantic. The greater paradox is that through this restraint one attains the natural. If at moments he appears to consider literary movements particularly in terms of theme (“On the new continent there is neither classical nor romantic nor Indian literature: as for classical, the Americans have no models; romantic, the Americans have no middle ages; Indian, the Americans scorn the savages and abhor the woods as a prison destined to them” [Mémoires d'outre-tombe, Book VIII, Ch. 5]), he more typically considered the ideal classical art he strove for as a true reflection of unperverted nature.

This love for the ugly which has taken hold of us, this horror of the ideal, this passion for the bandy-legged, the legless cripple, the one-eyed, the blacks, the toothless; this tenderness towards warts, wrinkles, scabs, and trivial, dirty, common forms, are a depravation of the mind not given to us by that nature which is so much talked about. Even when we like a certain ugliness, it is because we find in it a certain beauty. We prefer naturally a beautiful woman to an ugly woman, a rose to a thistle, the bay of Naples to the plain of Montrouge, the Parthenon to a pigsty.

(Essai sur la littérature anglaise)

In the same Essai of 1836 Chateaubriand suggests as clearly as anywhere his belief in the timelessness of great art; comparing an English ballad to the manner of the Homeric poet: “Nature, when it is not adulterated [“sophistiquée”] has a common type whose character is engraved at the base of all people's manners.”

Such were his tastes from the time of that “éducation classique” his mother had insisted on. And if (naturally) at first his own work was new, deformed, astounding, romantic, he learned as his education continued to restrain it.

It was Fontanes, I love to repeat, who encouraged my first attempts; he it was who announced the Génie du christianisme, his muse which, filled with an astonished devotion, guided mine in the new ways it had rushed into. He taught me to conceal the deformity of objects by the manner of lighting them, to place classical language as much as I could in the mouths of my romantic characters. There were formerly men who were conservationists of good taste like those dragons which guarded the golden apples of the garden of the Hesperides. They did not let youth in until it could touch the fruit without spoiling it.

(Mémoires d'outre-tombe, Book XIII, Ch. 7)

Already in 1802 Chateaubriand predicted the arrival of a renewed French literature, following the French Revolution, saying that some writers would try to leave the “old roads” while others would try to follow classical models, and that the latter would be successful, “because supporting themselves on the great traditions and the great men they would have surer guides.”

Yet it should be clear from preceding examples that Chateaubriand sees French “classicism” as based on the acquaintance of “classical” antiquity. He hopes his own affection for antiquity will lead him to write works worthy of becoming “classics.” His acquaintance with classical antiquity is wide; his love for it profound; his interest in it by no means limited to literature.

His historical works, from the early Essai sur les révolutions, testify to his love for ancient history. It becomes rapidly apparent that what he loves is not so much the details of that past, but its antiquity. We note already in the Essai: “The tableau of the barbaric nations offers something romantic which attracts us. We like to have depicted for us ways different from ours, especially if the ages have stamped on them the grandeur which reigns in old things, like those columns which seem more beautiful when the moss of time has attached itself to them.” The presence of the past in the present—the special province of the historian—is what seems to attract him to a Bossuet: as he writes to Fontanes in the letter “Sur la perfectibilité” in 1800, Bossuet “is in a thousand places at once … he changes time and place at will; he passes with the rapidity and majesty of the ages.” Chateaubriand's love for the old goes beyond the sentimental dreaming of the Génie du christianisme (“If it is true, as one might believe, that something is poetically beautiful in proportion to the antiquity of its origin …” [IV, iii, 3]); it is more than the anguish of a post-revolutionary generation seeking roots (in a political review he writes in 1818, trying to avert the destruction of national monuments: “Why does Rome have so much charm? Because one can read history there in chronological order on its ruins of every age”); it is the anguish of modern man seeking peace of soul in a sense of unity with all mankind as well as stability in some kind of established order. He writes to Madame de Staël in 1805, “I hope that you, as I, have found in Rome great soothing of the soul. Nothing helps one to make up one's mind about present events like past events.” Rome is where “all the ages are piled up.” Later in life his conversation, Sainte-Beuve remembers, could be filled with “the image of Rome” and the “historical inspiration which came to him from the Roman ruins his imagination had taken him back to” (Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire sous l'empire).

Chateaubriand sees the history of antiquity through its monuments, and in the art of Greece and Rome he is particularly sensitive to the dimensions of time. The ruins of ancient lands form a “sad spectacle, undoubtedly, but history [is] there and the silence of the present [lets] one hear the better the sound of the past.” His sensibility toward classical sites would be occasionally subject, in romantic fashion, to changes of mood (he writes from Verona to Madame Récamier in 1822, for instance, “Italy has not done anything to me. I have really changed: places without persons [i.e. loved ones, i.e. Madame Récamier, as earlier Madame de Beaumont] have lost all their sway over me,” and a year later, when he is in Paris and she goes off to Italy: “You will tell me, when you get back, if you saw Italy with the same eyes as in the past; whether the ruins said the same thing to you; and whether the changes in you have not reached out to that which surrounds you”), but this does not last, at least in the presence of historical perspectives. We know also of his maddening way of travelling through ancient lands at breakneck pace, refusing to see anything slightly out of the way, refusing to examine closely (he answered his host in Argos “that nature had not made him for such servile studies; that a height was sufficient to awaken immediately in his memory pleasing images from poetry and history … His servant and interpreter … confessed that two hours after his arrival anywhere he was accustomed to leave.” One may compare his instructions from Rome to Fontanes in 1803: “Come to see this land of the muses … Six months will be enough to see everything as a poet”). His first desire to know ancient Greece seems frivolous (he writes from Rome in 1803 to a friend: “I have decided to go to Greece next spring … I then will have seen everything a gentleman can more or less want to see: the American wilderness, the ruins of Rome and Greece, the beginnings of Oriental or Asiatic ways”). But despite all this his love is genuine.

Before he ever leaves France for the Mediterranean lands, at Avignon he becomes acquainted with the Provençal sun, the “sky which was to give me a foretaste of Italy and Greece, towards which my instinct and my muse were impelling me”; at Marseilles he hastens to Notre-Dame de la Garde “to admire the sea which is bordered by the ruins of all the famous countries of antiquity.” Later he speaks of Italy, “the dream of my days,” of Rome “where so many passions have been formed, from which so many men have not wished to return” (Vie de Rancé). Greece, whose monuments make Rome's seem less perfect by comparison, remains in his memory

like one of those shining circles one sees in closing his eyes. On this mysterious phosphorescence are sketched the ruins of a fine and admirable architecture, the whole made more resplendent yet by some other brightness of the muses. When will I find again the thyme of Hymettus, the rose laurel of the banks of the Eurotas? One of the men I have left most enviously on foreign shores is the Turkish customs officer of Piraeus: he lived alone, the guardian of three deserted ports, casting his eyes over bluish isles, brilliant promontories, golden seas. There I heard only the sound of the waves in the tomb of Themistocles and the murmur of far-away memories: in the silence of the remains of Sparta, even pride was mute.

(Mémoires d'outre-tombe, Book XVIII, Ch. 1)

“This sea of Greece, from which so many perfumes come to us …”

The defender of Christianity, the author of the Martyrs, must admit that in approaching the Holy Land “I did not feel that kind of agitation which I felt in sighting the coast of Greece.” Long after the Génie du christianisme he must admit it is “not true that our cathedrals approach the beauty of the Parthenon.” When the embassy secretary arrived in Rome in 1803, he was supposed to admire a fireworks display atop the Vatican announcing the feast of Saint Peter; instead, “I was looking at the effect of the moon on the Tiber, on these Roman houses, on these ruins which are everywhere here” (Voyage en Italie). Indeed the attraction of the lands of antiquity was so great that in 1828 he accepted a kind of political exile when he knew he was to be ambassador in Rome: “That word Rome had a magic effect on me: I experienced the temptation to which the anchorites were exposed in the desert.”

The mutual attraction of ancient history and antique sites came to take the place for the aging René (who in René had plotted out the poetic itinerary he himself had not yet taken, as Sainte-Beuve pointed out) of the exotic American dream. In the Itinéraire he compares a night in Sparta with the famous night in the American forest.

I listened to the sound of the wind in the solitude, the belling of buck and stag, the roaring of a distant cataract, while my half extinguished fire glowed under the foliage of the trees. I loved even the voice of the Iroquois when he raised a cry from the depths of the forests and under the starlight in the silence of nature he seemed to proclaim his boundless liberty. All that is pleasant at twenty, because life, so to speak, suffices for itself and because in the prime of youth something uneasy and vague carries us incessantly to our fancies, ipsi sibi somnia fingunt: but at a more mature age, the mind returns to more solid nourishment; it wants above all to be fed on memories and the examples of history … I would no longer seek out a new land which has not been torn by the plowshare; now I need old wastelands which will furnish me at will with the walls of Babylon, or the legions of Pharsalia, grandia ossa! fields whose furrows will instruct me, where I will find, man that I am, the blood, sweat, and tears of man.

The same comment is found in the Lettre à Fontanes sur la campagne romaine: “I doubt that Niagara Falls would cause me the same admiration any more.” He draws a distinction between youth, whose abundance of illusions fill nature with meaning, and age, where nature must include memories of society. This is how an artist regards the waste campagne romaine: “The aspect of a field of wheat or a hillside vineyard would not give you such strong emotions as the sight of this earth whose soil has not been rejuvenated by modern cultivation; which has remained ancient like the ruins covering it.” The great American rivers and lakes are without history and bleak. And indeed even the Alps fail to awaken any enthusiasm; they too lack memories: “Long live the Apennines for the great events and pleasing stories they recall”; “I should rather go seek on Tabor and Taygetus other colors and other harmonies, after having painted the fameless mountains and unknown valleys of the New World.”

But the best way to see Greece, Chateaubriand writes in a moment of fatigue from Constantinople in 1806, is in Homer. He may not be “one of those dauntless admirers of antiquity whom one line of Homer consoles for everything,” but he is primarily a literary man and his enthusiasm for the great writers of classical antiquity seems boundless. As a young man, very lonely, in Paris, 1786, he has “la rage du grec” and translates from the Odyssey daily. In 1800 he writes Fontanes that he no longer goes out unless he takes his Homer in one pocket and Ossian in the other. “For a long time,” he writes in the 1801 preface to Atala, “I have read nothing but Homer and the Bible.” On his voyage to the Orient he carries only “Racine, Tasso, Vergil, and a Homer with blank sheets bound in for notes” (and maybe also Thucydides and Pausanias, as Emile Malakis points out in his notes to the Itinéraire). On arriving at the Vallée-aux-Loups in 1811, the carriage he is riding in overturns: “The plaster bust of Homer, placed near Madame de Chateaubriand, jumped out the door and broke its neck: a bad omen for the Martyrs on which I was then working.” When he is obliged to sell all his books in 1817 he keeps only a “little Greek Homer with in its margins attempts at translation and notes in my hand.”

Sainte-Beuve pointed out already how in the famous parallel of Racine and Virgil in the Génie du christianisme one could feel the apologist's heartfelt partiality for Virgil. Moreau recognizes that the explicit thesis of the Génie—the superiority of Christian art compared to classical antiquity—was for Chateaubriand a “pure wager”: to place the ancients always in second place is “pious blasphemy which he corrects in new editions, changing into a question a sentence where he had baldly refused immortality to Sophocles, erasing another sentence in which he sacrificed Homer to Milton.” Instead of opposing Christianity and paganism, what Chateaubriand did was mingle them. Later in the Etudes historiques Chateaubriand saw a similar mingling as a part of the development of Christianity:

Hellenistic fictions lived in the minds of the converts to the gospel: they accused themselves of it, they shielded themselves from it as from the crime of magic, but they were obsessed by it. The poems of Homer and Virgil were like temples defended by a powerful demon: the bishops, priests, hermits did not dare to burn them, but they stole from these marvellous edifices everything they could convert to a holy use. Mythology, a dethroned Queen still reigning by her charms, took possession not only of Christian literature, but also of history: the Scandinavian and German nations had to descend from the Greeks and Trojans; the Iliad and the Aeneid had to become the first chronicles of the Franks. The barbarians of the north recognized themselves as children of Homer, just as the Arabs want to be sons of Abraham; miraculous power of genius, which gave as a father of Truth the father of fiction!

The writer who as late as the Essai sur la littérature anglaise speaks of the boring passages of Shakespeare and Dante in contrast to the “perfection of the whole and the just proportion of the parts” in the artistic monuments of “classical centuries” started out his literary career with such wishful thinking as “Atala, like Philoctetes, has only three characters” (Preface of 1801). He wishes for the genius of Homer, if it should cost him all Homer's misfortunes (Itinéraire).

Do you want to be convinced of the enormous difference of merit and fame between a great writer and a great politician? [Mémoires d'outre-tombe, Book XXX, Ch. 13: written at the end of his career.] My diplomatic labors were sanctioned by what is considered the supreme capability: that is, by success. And yet who will ever read this Memorandum [on France and the Orient in 1828, which has just been quoted]? Readers will hop over it, and in their place I would do the same. All right, suppose that instead of this little chancellery masterpiece one found in this paper an episode in the manner of Homer or Virgil, heaven having granted me their genius, do you think anyone would be tempted to skip the loves of Dido in Carthage or the tears of Priam in the tent of Achilles?

With Chateaubriand's classical tastes in mind, we must judge their effects upon his work. In his epics, looking backward as they do, he may be inviting defeat: so Herbert J. Hunt points out (The Epic in Nineteenth-Century France). It is not the Natchez or even the Martyrs which will win for Chateaubriand a twentieth-century audience. It is not his imitations of genres or his protestations of love and respect which count: it is the effect of this affection on his style and the effect of his style on the reader.

The most immediate reflections in his writing of his classical leanings are his comparisons, confrontations, and organized anachronisms. The comparisons range from the almost gratuitous (he meets a drunken sailor in Covent Garden during his émigration: “He asked me where he was; I told him, ‘In Covent Garden.’ ‘Pretty garden, indeed!’ he cried, seized, like the gods of Homer, by inextinguishable laughter”) to the extended comparisons, highly motivated for praise or satire: for instance, the great set of comparisons in the history of Napoleon in the Mémoires d'outre-tombe between the emperor and Attila, Dido, Ulysses, Clovis, Alaric, Alexander.

More revelatory of the sensibility of Chateaubriand are some of the confrontations between the past and present, from the scene in Atala in which the mystified Chactas sees lines of Homer and Solomon engraved in the trees by the hermit (“There was a certain mysterious harmony among this ancient wisdom, these verses eaten away by moss, this old hermit who had carved them, and these old oaks which served him as books”). The traveller in America is fascinated by towns “among the Muskhogeans, Seminoles, Cherokees, and Chickasaws” named Athens and Marathon. The historian of the Battle of Poitiers is fascinated by the ruins of Maupertuis. “By a peculiarity of chance the place where the vestiges of the English camp are seen is named today Carthage, as if fortune, to mock man, was pleased to wipe out one famous name by one more famous yet, a ruin by a ruin, a vanity by a vanity.” The historical parallels pushed as far as anachronisms is another mark of Chateaubriand's fascination with the march of time: the chapter “Charactère des Athéniens et des Français” in the Essai sur les révolutions, the mixture of historical characters in the Martyrs (or, for more recent times, in the French scenes of the Natchez). One result of this suppression of intervals in “this poetic history” of the Martyrs is, as Sainte-Beuve pointed out, an accumulation of everything striking: “I seem to see a gardener who planted a nursery completely of great oaks and cedars.”

But this constant recall of antiquity goes beyond a mere nobility of style, and past even the desire to eliminate the flight of time. It goes beyond the “inconstancy and disgusts of the human heart” seeking to “wander through far-away lands, among unknown people”; beyond the consolations of comparing one's fate to that of those once more unfortunate. It goes back to an inner conviction, the emotional counterpart of the esthetic doctrine that classical art is more “natural” than romantic art, that Rome and Greece are his true home.

Nostalgia is the regretting of the country of one's birth: on the banks of the Tiber one feels also homesickness, but it produces an effect opposite to its customary one: one is seized by the love of solitude and distaste for home. I had already known this homesickness at the time of my first stay [in Rome] and could say, Agnosco veteris vestigia flammae.

(Mémoires d'outre-tombe, Book XXX, Ch. 1)

I think it is this very much more personal emotional bond Chateaubriand feels with antiquity that explains his extraordinary images of classical places; in them a poetry universal and outside of time approaches the absolute serenity which finally distinguishes “classical” art for Chateaubriand. This poetry has more than the “ancient atmosphere” required by the fashion of the day which one critic saw in it; it contributes to French literature, as Victor Giraud pointed out for the Martyrs, “the poetic sense of antiquity, religion, and history.”

Rome sleeps amidst these ruins. That star of the night, that globe which we imagine a world ended and unpeopled, walks its pale solitudes above the solitudes of Rome; it lights uninhabited streets, enclosures, squares, gardens where no one passes, monasteries where the voices of the cenobites are no more heard, cloisters which are as deserted as the portals of the Colosseum.

What happened, eighteen centuries ago, at the same hour and in the same places? Not only is the old Italy no more, but the Italy of the middle ages has disappeared. Yet the trace of the two Italys is still well marked in Rome: if modern Rome shows its Saint Peters and all its masterpieces, old Rome contrasts its Pantheon and all its ruins; if the one makes its consuls and emperors descend from the Capitol, the other leads to the Vatican the long line of its pontiffs. The Tiber separates the two glories: seated in the same dust, pagan Rome sinks more and more into its tombs, and Christian Rome goes back little by little into the catacombs it came from.

I have in mind the subject of some twenty letters on Italy which perhaps might be read if I succeeded in rendering my ideas as I conceive them, but the days go by and I have no leisure. I feel like a traveller, forced to leave tomorrow, who has sent his baggage ahead. The baggage of man is his illusions and his years: he gives back every minute some of them to the one the Scriptures call a rapid coursier: Time.

(Voyage en Italie)