Chateaubriand, Medium Rare
CHATEAUBRIAND, François-[René] de.
Atala; ou Les amours de deux sauvages dans le désert: suivie de René. London, Colburn, 1809.
12mo in 6s, pp. ix, [1], 230; publisher’s advert to b3v; a few characters misprinted in final lines of pp. vi–vii; very occasional small marks, b3 a little short at outer and lower margins, but a very good copy; bound in contemporary half red morocco with drab sides, spine gilt in compartments and lettered directly in gilt; a little rubbed with a few minor losses, corners slightly bumped; ink ownership inscription of ‘Harriet Wrightson | May 1811’ to front flyleaf.
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Atala; ou Les amours de deux sauvages dans le désert: suivie de René.
First London edition in the original French, rare, of Chateaubriand’s first two published novellas, set in North America and supposedly written during his travels there while staying with Native Americans.
Inspired by his voyage to North America in 1791 and his encounter with a Native American tribe, Atala tells the tragic love story of the eponymous heroine, a half-Indigenous, half-European girl, and a Natchez man called Chactas, who narrates the story in his old age to the Frenchman René. In René, the Frenchman gives his own tragic account of familial rupture and self-imposed exile. Each novella was incorporated both into Chateaubriand’s Catholic apologia, Le génie du Christianisme, and into his Native American epic, Les Natchez, published in 1826. ‘Chateaubriand included the story of Atala in Le Génie, first, to show that Christianity and, in particular, the priesthood, is not in conflict with human nature as its eighteenth-century rationalist opponents maintained, but in sympathy with it; secondly, to illustrate the divine origin of natural creation in a series of magnificently voluptuous images’ (Wakefield, p. 14).
Atala was first published in Paris in 1801 and proved hugely popular, being translated into English, German, Dutch, and Spanish within a year and going through eleven editions by 1805; René first appeared as part of Le génie in 1802, and was first printed with Atala in 1805.
We find only three copies in the UK (BL, Bodley, CUL) and none in the US.
Not in Carteret; not in Vicaire. See Wakefield, ‘Chateaubriand’s “Atala” as a Source of Inspiration in Nineteenth-Century Art’, The Burlington Magazine 120, no. 898 (1978), pp. 13–24.