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 François René de Chateaubriand
France Belgium
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Zero and the Infinite could sum up the incident in Belgiume when Chateaubriand almost died.
At the place known as Zero, between Arlon and Marche, Chateaubriand, a soldier in the Princes' army, stopped near a Gypsy camp . He was exhausted, wounded, and burning with fever. A dark, good looking Gypsy girl begged him for charity and, as a daughter of Eve, gave him an apple to quench his thirst. The soldiers of the Prince de Ligne found him unconscious - "the last sound I heard was a leaf falling and a bullfinch singing (Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe) - In his plundered bag there remained nothing but a bundle of papers : the Attala manuscript that he has started writing by the campfire. An old woman nursed him while the army withdrew. He evoked the fogs, the smokes, the smells , the murmurings of this high plain.
Son of a Breton squire, in love with litterature, he witnessed the beginning of the Revolution. He took refuge in America as an explorer and a pioneer. After being wounded in the Army of the émigrés, he went into exile in England where he experienced poverty (le Génie du Christianisme) and world weariness (Attala, René). At first he regarded Bonaparte as a savior, but broke with him after the execution of the Duke of Enghien and then took strength in the idea of a redeeming Christianity (Les Martyrs). Disappointed by the Restoration, he reconciled his royalist sympathies and his open-mindedness by gathering around him romantic and liberal youth.
A precursor of Romanticism, a eulogist of the beauty of the Middle-Ages and of Gothic Art, a nature-lover, fascinated by death, he described himself as an epicurian with a Catholic imagination. He went far beyond an aesthetic Christianity, however.
The emptiness, and the disenchantment of the world led him to a nomadic life that was a spiritual experience akin to that of Abraham.
Chateaubriand's epic work culminates in the Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe where imagination and the physical world, thought and history, merge into a vision where the transient past reflects a poetic and prophetic interpretation of the future and reaches the Infinite.
Isn't it amazing to find in the writing of this aristocrat : Europe is on the road to democracy (L'Avenir du Monde) or how shall we find a place on this earth enlarged by the power to be everywhere at once, and and narrowed by the small proportions of a fully-explored world
All that is left is to ask science for a way of changing the planet (Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe). |
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