The miller’s rifles, laid horizontally in the gun rack, glinted in the firelight glow. It was lit only by the corn straw and the bean shells blazing in the fireplace.

He sets the scene with picturesque flourishes: News reached him of the arrest of Louis XVI, he reports, in a farmhouse somewhere in the Ohio River Valley. There, after seeking out and meeting President George Washington in Philadelphia (a story that, it turns out, is almost certainly false), Chateaubriand worked his way up the Hudson River valley, spent time with various Native American tribes, and visited Niagara Falls (these trips provided him raw material for his novel, René, which would be published to acclaim in 1802). Initially drawn to the Republican cause, he left France after witnessing mob violence in Paris and traveled, under the pretext of finding the Northwest Passage, to the newly independent United States. He was born in 1768, the youngest child of a noble Breton family, and spent his childhood near the ocean in Saint-Malo, and later at his father’s medieval castle at Combourg, before entering the army on the eve of the French Revolution. Recognized by historians as a founder of French Romanticism (he was an inspiration for Victor Hugo, among others), Chateaubriand lived squarely in the thick of a tumultuous time in French history. The raw materials of that life provided a rich vein for autobiography. And yet the engrossing memoir he left behind belies his claim: here is a book whose style still speaks, and well enough to have fashioned a life still worth speaking about. “It has been claimed that true beauty is for all time,” he writes, “yes, if we are speaking of beauties of feeling and thought, but no, not beauties of style.” This consummate stylist knew style’s limits.

Such are the vagaries of posterity, as Chateaubriand himself would have appreciated. To contemporary Anglophone readers, alas, his name conjures little more than the eponymous dish, a decadent cut of beef tenderloin. French writers from Baudelaire to Proust to Roland Barthes attested to the greatness of his prose style. But Chateaubriand is either older or more obscure (or both) than most of his list-mates. Most of this handsome list consists of overlooked worthies from the 20th century, or reissues of lesser-known texts by well-known 19th century authors. Even for the rare air of the New York Review Books Classics, François-René de Chateaubriand’s Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 1768-1800 is recherché.

Memoirs from beyond the grave 1768 1800