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.
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