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One of my favorite passages in Baudelaire’s criticism is the picture, in his tribute to Gautier, of French literature of the 1830s, “that period of prolific crisis in which Romantic literature was unfolding, so vigorously,” a period over which Chateaubriand, “still full of creative strength, but as though prostrate on the horizon,” rose “like an Athos, contemplating with nonchalance the stirrings on the plain.” That is not, as I once assumed, simply an extravagant way of saying that Chateaubriand was old. As early as 1811, in the closing pages of the Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem he could write, “I have written enough if my name is destined to survive and too much if it is destined to vanish.” In Book 18 of Memoirs from Beyond the Grave he says that by 1814 his “life of poetry and study,” his “literary career, properly so called,” had come to an end. “My political writings began under the Restoration,” with Of Bonaparte and the Bourbons, and “with these writings my active political life likewise began.”

Chateaubriand’s neat separation of his careers did not, of course, determine the shape he gave to his memoirs. The third volume of Alex Andriesse’s translation of Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, which covers 1815–1830, or Books 25 to 34, is not exclusively occupied by political reflection and forecast. At its heart is an 80-page tribute to Madame Récamier, set amidst Chateaubriand’s account of his Berlin, London, and Vatican embassies, his tenure as Foreign Minister and support of l’Expédition d’Espagne, and his narrative of the July Revolution. “As she wanders through these Memoirs, in the bends of the basilica I am hastening to complete,” he wrote, “she may come upon the chapel I have dedicated to her here.”

The chapel is Chateaubriand’s contribution to that corpus of homage in which Récamier figures as a paragon of French civilization. To the salonnière’s orchestration of a spirited sociability, her cultivation and encouragement of original voices “to create a sense of harmonious well-being that could transcend the burden of reality” (Benedetta Craveri’s formulation), Récamier added the powerful aura of an individual Muse, particularly for Madame de Staël, who called her “the heroine of every sentiment,” “an angel of purity and beauty,” and in another “love-like” letter asked, “Isn’t everything a picture in the memories one retains of you?” Chateaubriand quotes Benjamin Constant’s recollection of the women’s intense dialogue:

The speed of the one in expressing a thousand new thoughts, the speed of the other in grasping and judging them; that strong male mind that unveiled everything, and that delicate and subtle mind that comprehended everything; these revelations of a practiced genius communicated to a youthful intelligence worthy of receiving them: all of this formed a union impossible to describe if one has not had the happiness of witnessing it oneself.

For Chateaubriand, nothing in Madame de Staël’s printed works approached the natural eloquence and imaginative expression of her letters to Récamier, the virtue of whose friendship helped “a woman of genius bring forth what was hidden and hitherto unrevealed in her talent.”

Salonnière and Muse, with touches of Guinevere and Marianne. Masséna wore a white ribbon from Récamier’s dress during his Genoese campaign of 1800; in the Caesarian third person he wrote to assure her that “it never left the general and constantly favored his victory.” After the exile of Madame de Staël in 1803, Récamier lent herself to Montmorency’s plan to approach Marshal Bernadotte and General Moreau, “to see if they might band together against Bonaparte.” The two soldiers were “delighted to see their discontent embraced by such beauty, such wit, such grace,” and “found something romantic and poetic about this woman, so young and attractive, speaking to them of the liberty of their homeland.” “Bernadotte,” continues Constant, “kept telling Madame Récamier that she was made to electrify the world and to create fanatics.” Nothing came of the meetings; relishing their audience, the men were inspired to declaim – “kept telling” – but not to quest.

Just as well. Chateaubriand felt that for all the fineness of his portrait, Constant overstated Récamier’s involvement, for she “did not hold with politics except through the large-hearted interest she took in the defeated of every party.” He doesn’t lament Montmorency’s plan as a missed chance, as he surely believed that Récamier was made to inspire geniuses, not recruit plotters or create fanatics. Chateaubriand thought himself no less transformed by Récamier’s attention than Madame de Staël was. He ends his tribute affirming “that all that was dear to me has been dear to me in Madame Récamier, and that it was she who was the hidden source of my affections.”

Chateaubriand’s life was, as he says of Récamier’s, “at once so impressive and so secluded.” Behind or above the honors of his later career, his embassies and ministries, orations and receptions, he was always a poet – a particular kind of poet: wayfaring, exilic, unplaceable; sensitive to injustice, enchanted by contingent beauty, alive to every irony, his itinerant lyre leading him to “the very brink of parody” above an “abyss of seriousness,” as his admirer Nabokov wrote in The Gift, a novel whose protagonist, a poor émigré poet, tells his beloved that he must make his way along a narrow ridge between his own truth “and a caricature of it.”

One day [in the Chamber of Peers], the front row of armchairs, quite close to the rostrum, was filled with respectable peers, each one deafer than the next, with their heads bent forward, all holding hearing-trumpets whose bells were upturned toward the platform. My speech put them to sleep, as was only natural. Then one of them dropped his hearing-trumpet, and his neighbor, awakened by the clatter, courteously endeavored to pick up his colleague’s trumpet; he fell down. The worst of it was that I began to laugh, although I had been speaking poignantly about some matter of humanity. I forget what.

Book designers: know that for Chateaubriand you can use Daumier as justly as Delacroix!

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Eric Byrd is a librarian and archivist living in Minneapolis-St Paul, Minnesota.