SOURCE: Spininger, Dennis J. “The Paradise Setting of Chateaubriand's Atala.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 89, no. 3 (May 1974): 530-6.

[In the following essay, Spininger considers the symbolic values of the landscape descriptions in Atala. Spininger claims the tensions in the descriptions not only serve Chateaubriand's aesthetic purposes, but represent the doubleness of the New World as an exotic, Eden-like paradise which also is harsh and savage.]

The lush landscape description with which Chateaubriand begins his novel Atala has been approached from curiously myopic critical perspectives. Hostile critics have usually attempted to undermine its authenticity. Favorable critics have too often swooned without performing adequate analysis. The details of the description have been checked and rechecked from the points of view of geography, botany, and zoology. Various discerned errors, departures from the scientifically verified fauna and flora of the region he describes, have been used as the basis for determining that Chateaubriand's voyage to America did not include a visit to the Louisiana area. He has even been accused of plagiarizing from accounts of travel.¹ His defenders, while admitting the errors of fact and certain borrowings, have done little more than proclaim the descriptions to be so picturesque as to compensate for their inaccuracies. These putative admirers imply that Chateaubriand merely yielded to an uncontrolled (and perhaps uncontrollable) impulse for picturesqueness and local color, suggesting, however, that the results are so poetically executed as to justify his lack of control.² No one to my knowledge has considered the functional value of these descriptions in terms of any artistic value higher than the questionable one of exoticism for its own romantic sake.

This is the challenge that has still to be met. Close examination of the particulars of Chateaubriand's description reveals, as this study hopes to demonstrate, that he organized his exotic details with esthetic purpose. What Chateaubriand deliberately accomplished was a partial analogy between the New World setting of Atala as “le nouvel Éden” and its mythic counterpart, the “old” Eden. By a carefully designed series of motifs he adapted the exotic atmosphere of a virtually unknown America to the tradition of garden paradises, familiar to him primarily through his acquaintance with Milton's Paradise Lost.³ By an even more complex adaptation, he subtly suggested not a replica of the original but a region at once both paradisiacal and touched by the dualities that figure as symptoms of a post-lapsarian state. The function of this ambivalently “mixed” landscape will be clearer after the details of the basic analogy are established. There is both external and internal evidence for this.

It is known that the discovery of a previously uncharted continent, the “New World,” generated during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that Renaissance feeling of suddenly expanded horizons and, often, literal applications of paradise and Golden Age expectations. As a recent historian has written, “that release of energies known as the Renaissance was largely stimulated by geographical excitement as interpreted by the myth of Eden.”⁴ Thus, when Chateaubriand casually introduces the paradise analogy into his description of the North American lands possessed by France “autrefois” as “une délicieuse contrée que les habitants des États-Unis appellent le nouvel Éden,”⁵ he is employing a name that had been historically applied to the Americas. Its suitability for his text, however, surpasses its use as a device for gaining authenticity.

The New World as metaphor as well as a geographic reality, the metaphor Chateaubriand's narrator employs in his final address to the Indians “du Nouveau-Monde” (p. 165), is allied to a general emphasis upon new beginnings and automatically recalls the mythic instance of man's beginning. This sense is reinforced by other terms, such as “la Nouvelle France” (p. 151) and the name for Père Aubry's missionary settlement, “cette nouvelle Béthanie” (p. 113).

The phrase “le nouvel Éden” is therefore an explicit clue to the nature of an operative analogy. The use of the unusual term “délicieuse contrée” to describe a landscape is another, though implicit, clue. The same adjective appears in the account of creation in Chateaubriand's Les Martyrs, where it refers directly to the Garden of Eden: “Lorsque le Tout-puissant eut formé le premier homme du limon de la terre, il le plaça dans un jardin plus délicieux que les bois de l'Arcadie” (Les Martyrs, Bk. xii).⁶ A description of the celestial paradise in the same work includes “des jardins délicieux” (O.C., iv, 44).

Meta H. Miller, in her Chateaubriand and English Literature, has drawn attention to the passages in Les Martyrs, but without applying her findings to Atala.⁷ She points out that Milton uses the same adjective twice for his Edenic setting: “… this delicious grove, / This garden planted with the trees of God” (Paradise Lost vii.537-38) and

Of Eden, where delicious Paradise,
Now nearer, crowns with her enclosing green,
As with a rural mound, the champain head
Of a steep wilderness. …

(Paradise Lost iv.132-35)⁸

“In qualifying the garden,” Miller writes, “both authors, again, agree with the Bible [Genesis ii.15] which made it ‘délicieux’” (Miller, p. 55). Whether Chateaubriand's source was Milton or the Bible is less important for the moment than the evidence of a conscious association between the garden of paradise and the American “nouvel Éden.”

Familiarity with the conventional landscape features of paradise permits the discovery of another implicit reference to this tradition. In the paragraph preceding the mention of name, Chateaubriand specifies “quatre grands fleuves” with their source in the mountains “[qui] divisaient ces régions immenses.” The terrestrial paradises of the medieval and Renaissance periods, because of their common precedents in a tradition supplied by classical and biblical passages, had a tremendous store of standard descriptive motifs.⁹ One of these was the four rivers or channels or streams, a motif that recurred with great frequency and would have been known to Chateaubriand from the original account in Genesis ii.10-14, or its use by Dante (Purgatorio xxvii.128-31), or by Milton (Paradise Lost iv.233). “According to the Vulgate, four rivers watered the garden in Eden: Phison, Gehon, Tigris, and Euphrates. (In most modern translations the Tigris is rendered as the Hiddekel)” (Giamatti, p. 70). Chateaubriand brings the geographical names into authentic line with actual American rivers, but the emphasis upon four goes beyond mere literal accuracy. That he was aware of the four rivers as a conventional detail of the terrestrial paradise can be shown through another allusion in Les Martyrs. There, in Book iii (O.C., iv, 44), he pictures a single river for the celestial Eden, but remarks how this differs from the terrestrial paradise: “Un fleuve découle du trône du Tout-Puissant; il arrose le céleste Éden. … L'onde mystérieuse se partage en divers canaux qui s'enchaînent, se divisent, se rejoignent.” Originally, as Chateaubriand tells us in the “remarques” to this novel (O.C., iv, 368), he had placed four rivers in the celestial Eden to indicate a correspondence to the terrestrial paradise: “On lisoit dans les premières éditions quatre fleuves. J'avois voulu rappeler le paradis terrestre.” He has changed this to one river in later editions to accord with the biblical text (Apocalypse xxii.4).¹⁰

The description of the American rivers in an early fragment, known to have been reworked for the landscape in Atala, does not refer to any specific number. This earlier passage is published in the Garnier edition of the novel as part of an appendix, “Fragments du Génie du Christianisme” (pp. 377-79), and when it is examined, one is forced to conclude that sometime between this early fragment and the incorporation of it into Atala, Chateaubriand decided upon a mythical context for his description.

The very lushness of that description, its anti-classical and exotic fullness, is related to the paradise tradition of lovely landscapes. “The descriptions of those poets most influenced by antiquity were the most ‘classical’ in that they were stylistically the least elaborate. … These passages tended to sum up the earthly paradise in a few evocative lines. Those who modeled themselves on the Bible (or previous ‘orthodox’ accounts) had no such august literary check upon them. They were free to expand, and they did. As time went on, what we have termed the ‘orthodox’ type of description tended to dominate” (Giamatti, pp. 78-79). Chateaubriand's description, like Milton's, is of this “orthodox” type, and what has been facilely assessed as a poetic and picturesque rhapsody is something much more. His exoticism is particularly oriented toward supporting the Edenic qualities of his setting. Again and again, details recall the basic analogy established by the suggestive name, “new Eden.” Hence, for instance, it is the creativity of the Mississippi's tributaries that he stresses, reporting how they nourish the land with their silt and fertilize it with their waters (p. 31). The Mississippi—“c'est le Nil des déserts”—is the Nile of this American wilderness. The biblical Gehon, as Chateaubriand must have known, was identified as the Nile.

The strange flowers, the curious animals, “la sauvage abondance” of the shores, the floral bridges (“des ponts de fleurs”) across the arms of the river, and the overall mixture of grace and splendor (“la grâce est toujours unie à la magnificence dans les scènes de la nature,” pp. 31-32), are all elements of an exoticism, not for its own sake, but specifically geared to engender a kind of remoteness and beauty commensurate with their paradisiacal model. To catalog errors in accuracy as proof that Chateaubriand's voyage to America did not include a visit to the region he describes is an impertinent labor the fruits of which, whatever significance they might have for determining biographical issues, are not literary.

Much more important to literary criticism is the observation of how he surmounted the difficulty of simultaneously recalling the paradise tradition while specifying “fallen” conditions. This he does by introducing, again with little reliance upon geographic authenticity, qualities that are clearly at odds with the natural harmony of paradise. The analysis of the Mississippi's “creative” benefits continues with a detail that indicates the mortality of this new Eden's inhabitants: it washes its flooded waters past “pyramids of Indian tombs.” The flower ships, “ces vaisseaux de fleurs,” which are carried along the riverbanks have not only herons and flamingoes as passengers, but serpents and young crocodiles (p. 32).

Tombs, serpents, and crocodiles recur as motifs throughout the novel and acquire status as symbolic imagery. Their immediate function, however, is to alert the reader to the altered tone with which Chateaubriand now begins to introduce oppositions; for the internal and dramatic oppositions that wage war in the heart of Atala—those “contrariétés du cœur humain”¹¹—are anticipated as conditions of the setting. In this sense the setting may be called symbolic.

The two banks of the Mississippi present “le tableau le plus extraordinaire” (pp. 32-33). The river divides the landscape to form two sides of “un admirable contraste” which is more than physical. It is obviously not a contrast of paradise and nonparadise, for traditional paradisiacal motifs emerge on both sides of the contrast: the repose of the one, the mountain and the perfumes of the other. Rather it projects a “double character” for the new Eden as a whole, corresponding to the double character of fallen man.

The western bank is all silence and repose, its prairies “sans bornes,” while the green billows “semblent monter dans l'azur du ciel” (p. 33). On the other side are mountains and a forest. “Suspendus sur le cours des eaux, groupés sur les rochers et sur les montagnes, dispersés dans les vallées, des arbres de toutes les formes, de toutes les couleurs, de tous les parfums, se mêlent, croissent ensemble, montent dans les airs à des hauteurs qui fatiguent les regards” (pp. 33-34). A large number of animals, “placés dans ces retraites par la main du Créateur,” provide additional life and enchantment. There is a colorful list of them, including the intoxicated bear which made such a stir amongst early readers.¹² More important for our purposes, the list includes bird-catching serpents, deceptively suspending themselves from the domes of the forests to seem like vines.

There is also a contrast of sound: “Si tout est silence et repos dans les savanes de l'autre côté du fleuve, tout ici, au contraire, est mouvement et murmure” (p. 36). The noises include “faibles gémissements” and “sourds meuglements” as well as “doux roucoulements.” The result is that these forest spaces are filled with a paradoxical harmony, “une tendre et sauvage harmonie.” The sounds and sights of these “champs primitifs de la nature” are indeed so strange that the narrator admits his attempts to describe them are in vain. This is an important admission; it adds inexpressibility to paradox, and these together become the demonstrably emphasized features of the landscape. We have an approximate paradise, marked with signs of the Fall, and a resistance to definite description. Both are Romantic features, and since the inexpressibility inheres in the problem of portraying the paradox, the two elements are also related. To claim that it is finally impossible to describe is to employ a kind of negative formula for indicating the superlative.¹³ It accents the exotic quality in the direction of the marvelous. At the same time, the ambivalence of the landscape is suggested firmly enough to encompass a sense of innocence that is extreme, yet not quite “unfallen.” There is a record of previous passion, as it were, in the signs of past floods, as in the story itself passion will play a destructive role. The first human feature noted is a tomb, a clear token of mutability. Still, the association with paradise remains unavoidable.

A. Bartlett Giamatti, as part of the summary to his investigations of “special or blessed gardens,” asserts two basic ideas common to all the accounts, whether classical or medieval, religious or secular. “The place,” he writes, “is remote in space or time (or both), and it involves some ideal of love or harmony. These twin themes, the first ‘external’ and concerned with the place's ‘geography,’ the second ‘internal’ and related to its way of life, are found in every account. It is a beautiful place because that is the best symbol for man's inner need and desire for peace and harmony; it is lost or far away or fortified or … false, because that is the only way to convey man's daily awareness of the impossibility of attaining his ideal” (pp. 84-85).

These same two basic ideas are present in Chateaubriand's paradise setting: the exotic coloring of the landscape reinforces the remoteness, while the disparate elements, suggesting a harmony at once tender and wild, posit an indescribable beauty. The setting serves as a double background: for the harsh discrepancies that prevent earthly attainment of paradise, and for a religious ideal, compounded of both love and harmony. Whether or not these are compatible factors remains to be seen. Our present concern is for the way Chateaubriand distinguishes his locale from the model he persistently recalls.

The relationship of this “new Eden” to the literary tradition of paradise cannot account for his conspicuous emphasis upon disparate elements. Typically, the traditional gardens do not have antagonistic features. All of the elements are geared in one direction: to illustrate a natural environment of plenitude, perfectly suited to satisfying the needs and desires of men directly.

Chateaubriand also eliminates some of the conventional topoi. It is not a land of perpetual spring which knows neither storms nor war. It is not free from labor and the sweat of the brow (the biblical signs of fallen man), though its labors are “primitive.” It is not free from strife, even amongst the natives; it is, in fact, rife with dangers of violence from men, animals, and “natural” conditions. His landscape contains many negative qualities uneasily situated next to radical, positive benefits. Without vetoing the sense of an Edenic setting, these qualities do prevent the easy identification with an absolute primitive state of natural and perfect innocence.

It may at once be noticed that this is also true of its protagonists. Though the subtitle of Atala is “Les Amours de deux sauvages dans le désert,” neither Atala nor Chactas are primitive innocents, savages of the Rousseauistic “noble” type. As with the landscape description, so at the human level, too, the possible inference of idyllic and primitive innocence is checked. “Étrange contradiction du cœur de l'homme!” (p. 53), Chactas remarks.

If Chateaubriand's “new Eden” emerges as a setting of paradoxical contradictions, does it ever achieve the full status of a terrestrial paradise? At one point in the novel, after Atala has liberated him from captivity and agreed to join him in flight, Chactas knows the joys of Adam complemented by his Eve. He calls her the “fille plus belle que le premier songe de l'époux” (p. 55). There is even a scene in which the couple clothe and adorn one another:

Atala me fit un manteau avec la seconde écorce du frêne, car j'étais presque nu. Elle me broda des mocassines de peau de rat musqué, avec du poil de porc-épic. Je prenais soin à mon tour de sa parure. Tantôt je lui mettais sur la tête une couronne de ces mauves bleues, que nous trouvions sur notre route, dans ces cimetières indiens abandonnés; tantôt je lui faisais des colliers avec des graines rouges d'azaléa; et puis je me prenais à sourire, en contemplant sa merveilleuse beauté.

(pp. 78-79)

Ernst Dick, in his examination of Milton's influence upon the novel,¹⁴ points to this passage as reminiscent of Paradise Lost ix.838-40:

                    Adam … had wove
Of choicest flowers a garland to adorn
Her tresses. …

He goes on to compare “ces riantes hôtelleries, préparées par le grand Esprit” (p. 80), where Chactas and Atala rest in the shade, to the first parents' bower:

                                        … a place
Chosen by the sovran Planter, when he framed
All things to man's delightful use.

(iv.690-92)

The descriptions of the hostelry and the bower bear closer comparison, and there are also similarities in their meals of supper-fruits and the praises for their loved ones spoken by Eve and Atala in the respective texts. Dick is correct in attributing the influence to Milton rather than to the biblical account. But his idea that “Chactas und Atala mit ihrer schönen Einsamkeit und ihrer einfachen Geschichte sind nur mit Adam und Eva in ihrem köstlichen Eden zu vergleichen, die genau dasselbe Drama aufführen,” is an exaggerated conclusion for the discoveries he has made. The relationship of a mythic archetype as a structural model is clear; that some of the details employed to recall this archetype to the reader are borrowed from Milton may be asserted without damage to Chateaubriand's originality.¹⁵ That precisely the same drama is enacted is simply untrue.

Chateaubriand consistently overlaps two layers or perspectives, one of innocence, one of fallen conditions, so as to ensure his focus upon man's double nature. He recalls by specific and general allusion just enough of the original idyllic happiness to maintain the sense of duality that is central to his attention, and needs to be central in the reader's, if one is to understand the predicament that necessitates a new ideal capable of uniting the various disparates. We are being prepared, in a word, for his Romantic conception of redemption, informed by the Christian ideal of a synthesis and a reconciliation embodied in the celestial paradise. The terrestrial paradise cannot be restored. The sense in which it hovers about this pair of Indian lovers produces as much contrast as similarity, as much irony as hope.

Their hostelry—“ce monument du désert”—recalls the bower of Adam and Eve without being able to duplicate the supreme joys that Milton's pair possessed in it. They give thanks to Providence for their provisions, for having placed within the midst of fetid marshes those plants whose dew they drink (p. 81). If drinking from horn-shaped flowers suggests an unusual elegance, we are not allowed to forget the marshes and the wasteland that surround them, nor that such elegance is rare. Chactas compares the flower cups of dew to hope, placed “au fond des cœurs ulcérés.”

At the height of an apparent identity between the new Eden and the old, the ambivalence, implicit in the descriptions of the opening pages, returns as a definite token of “fallen” conditions. The storm that shatters the wilderness peace is yet another projection into the environmental setting of a tension that is really interior and that, by its persistence, indicates that the terrestrial paradise is an impossibility. This storm precedes the dramatic entrance of Père Aubry, the priest character who later says to the ill-starred lovers: “Ève avait été créée pour Adam, et Adam pour Ève. S'ils n'ont pu toutefois se maintenir dans cet état de bonheur, quels couples le pourront après eux?” (p. 131). The lesson that paradise is not of this earth is the lesson the protagonists must and do learn. At the beginning of the section called “Le Drame,” Chactas says as much, employing the image of a collapsed dream: “Si mon songe de bonheur fut vif, il fut aussi d'une courte durée, et le réveil m'attendait” (p. 114).

This cannot, of course, altogether disqualify the possibility of a heavenly or celestial realm of synthesis in which all opposites are reconciled. Pierre Sage, in Le “bon prêtre” dans la littérature française d'Amadis de Gaule au Génie du Christianisme (Genève and Lille: Droz-Giard, 1951), has called Aubry's missionary settlement “la petite société arcadienne, campée dans le Paradis retrouvé” (p. 176). It does, indeed, correspond to various missionary attempts to realize the terrestrial paradise in the New World, a fact Chateaubriand knew, since he described several colonies of this type in the Génie.¹⁶

Père Aubry is thus allied, through his profession and the special qualities or powers by which he at once represents and transcends his profession (one of his symbols is a tamed serpent), to the two distinct paradisiacal conceptions. The section of the novel called “Les Laboureurs” deals with Aubry's “new Bethany” and is dominated by earthly paradise associations. When the discovery of Atala's imminent death relegates all temporal solutions to a subordinate position, the section called “Le Drame” advances and stresses the possibility of a celestial paradise.

Pierre Sage suggests that, though Aubry's Arcadian society “est promise … à la destruction et à la mort, si elle vient à rencontrer l'humanité réelle, cupide et méchante,” Aubry himself continues to possess “le rève édénique de l'homme” in its celestial affiliations. “S'il a paru d'abord favoriser les rêves de félicité terrestre et les plaisirs de l'amour enivré, il sait ensuite guider Atala et son amant jusqu'à une vue plus authentique et infiniment plus noble de la destinée humaine” (pp. 429; 439-40). To assert the superior authenticity and greater nobility of the celestial kingdom, however, is not proof of its attainment. A heavenly reconciliation of opposites, in which the passions are corrected without being extinguished,¹⁷ by which all wounds are healed (p. 176), shifts the Edenic objective to a level that is not susceptible to proof.

This tentative solution is, in any case, difficult to accept, especially as the final image of the novel returns to the dualities set up in the “Prologue.”¹⁸ Chactas once characterizes himself as a savage whom the Great Spirit has wished to civilize. He calls René, who is listening to his tale, the civilized man who has become a savage. The inner duality this suggests is also reflected in the frame-narrator, Chateaubriand's narrative persona, who has known exile and loneliness. At the end of the novel, this narrator watches a procession of Indian exiles, members of Chactas' tribe, wandering “entre la patrie perdue et la patrie à venir” (p. 165). Translated into the paradisiacal vocabulary, this reaffirms man's position between the lost Eden and the Eden to come. The loss of the one is unhappily sure, while the attainment of the other is desperately uncertain. It is a bitter and unhappy scene with which the narrator strongly empathizes because he is a wanderer, too, and in exile. The positive associations of the “new Eden” seem to have collapsed, like Chactas' bright dream. The Old World (represented by the narrator) and the New World (represented by the Indians) are equated, but the paradisiacal connotations have been shorn from the equation.

Notes

1. For a sympathetic discussion of Chateaubriand's borrowings, see Gilbert Chinard, L'Exotisme américain dans l'œuvre de Chateaubriand (Paris: Hachette, 1918), esp. pp. 247-64.

2. E.g., Oscar Kuhns in his “Introduction” to Chateaubriand, Atala, ed. O. Kuhns, Heath's Modern Language Series (Boston: Heath, 1905), p. v: “Everywhere he sought,—not clear thoughts or convincing arguments,—but picturesque descriptions, poetic rhapsodies, and melancholy reflections on the vanity of life.” Even Chinard, p. 264, claims that the landscape descriptions were “composés en vue d'un effet grandiose,” without explaining this effect in detail.

3. Chateaubriand translated Milton's Paradise Lost in 1836 and critically discussed the English epic in both his Génie du Christianisme (1802) and the Essai sur la littérature anglaise (1836).

4. Charles L. Sanford, The Quest for Paradise: Europe and the American Moral Imagination (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1961), p. 41. The paradisiacal analogies begin, as Sanford shows, with Columbus himself.

5. Atala. René. Les Aventures du dernier Abencérage, ed. Fernand Letessier (Paris: Garnier, 1965), p. 30. Subsequent references are to this Garnier edition and are placed in the text.

6. In Œuvres complètes, iv (Paris: Garnier, 1929-38), 175; henceforth cited as O.C. The italics are mine.

7. The Johns Hopkins Studies in Romance Literatures and Languages, 4 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1925), p. 55. Adolf Köhler, Quellenuntersuchung zu Chateaubriands “Les Martyrs,” Inaugural dissertation, Universität Leipzig (Leipzig: Druck von O. Leiner, 1913), p. 28, precedes Miller in suggesting a relation to Milton.

8. The text of Milton's Paradise Lost is taken from that published on facing pages with Chateaubriand's prose translation, Le Paradis perdu, in O.C., xi, 276, 136. The French rendering is literal in each case: “ce délicieux bocage” for “delicious grove” (p. 277) and “le délicieux Paradis” for “delicious paradise” (p. 137). There is a third use in Milton not indicated by Miller: “this delicious place” (Paradise Lost iv.729).

9. This is both asserted and amply demonstrated by A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966). See esp. pp. 70-73.

10. Again Miller, p. 37, following Köhler, p. 29, points to the Miltonic parallel: “The river which waters Eden recalls the one described in Paradise Lost.” Milton employs the traditional division of four (see O.C., xi, 140-41).

11. From Chateaubriand's own description in the “Préface de la première édition” (1801), included in the Garnier edition, p. 9.

12. See Bernard A. Facteau, “Note on Chateaubriand's Atala,” Modern Language Notes, 48 (1933), 492-97, for an addition to the information compiled by Joseph Bédier, “Chateaubriand en Amérique. Verité et fiction,” in Etudes critiques (Paris: Colin, 1903), pp. 125-294.

13. The term “negative formula” is derived from Howard R. Patch, The Otherworld according to Descriptions in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1950), p. 12, where it refers to the tendency to employ the technique of describing what paradise was not so as indirectly to imply what it was. The term is also used by Giamatti, pp. 84-85. The typical device of no winter, no labor, no unappeased hungers, etc., is shifted into high gear by Chateaubriand as “not describable.”

14. “Chateaubriands Verhältnis zu Milton,” Festschrift zum 14. Neuphilologentage in Zürich 1910 (Zürich: Zürcher and Furrer, 1910), pp. 20-23.

15. None of Dick's evidence can support the militant claim of plagiarism he later launched at Chateaubriand in his “Plagiat, Nachahmung und Originalität bei Chateaubriand,” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, 3 (1911), 394-410.

16. Génie du Christianisme, ed. Pierre Reboul, 2 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1966); see ii, 152-60, on the Jesuit colonies in Paraguay.

17. In the “Préface de 1805,” also included in the Garnier edition, Chateaubriand claimed that religion “corrige les passions sans les éteindre.” See p. 175.

18. For a fuller treatment of this problem, see my as yet unpublished thesis, “Paradise and the Fall as Theme and Structure in Four Romantic Novels,” Diss. Wisconsin 1968, pp. 121-27.