ATALA

By François Auguste de Chateaubriand

Illustrated by GUSTAVE DORÉ

FULL-SIZE -- Medium-Size

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION.

PROLOGUE

I. THE HUNTERS.

II. THE LABORERS.

III. THE DRAMA.

EPILOGUE.

INTRODUCTION.

Among the illustrious names which adorn the annals of France, that of François Auguste de Chateaubriand, the author of "Atala," "Les Martyrs," "The Last of the Abencerages," and many other brilliant and renowned works, occupies a proud pre-eminence. But his fame rests not merely upon his literary achievements. His services as a statesman and the record and example of his private life-even his sufferings and misfortunes-have served to enhance his reputation and endear his memory, both among his own countrymen, and among just, noble and patriotic minds in other lands. He was great both by his character and abilities; and, while his celebrity is undiminished by the lapse of time, his works are still read and will long continue to be read and admired, even through all changes in the manners and sentiments of mankind. Fashions and modes in literature and art, as in society, come and go; new institutions arise, demanding new methods and modifying cherished customs; and men's thoughts enlarge and widen with improved conditions, as with the inevitable progress of the age. But the master mind ever asserts its power. He who has once truly stirred the human heart in its purest depths speaks not alone to his own generation, but appeals to all other hearts and belongs to all his race. His good gifts are the birthright of the world. The rank of Chateaubriand has been fixed by the united judgment of his associates and his successors; and since time has allayed the fierce passions which raged in France during his lifetime, his character is more and more deeply respected and admired. His sincerity of purpose and enlightened understanding, his grandeur and nobility of thought, his energy of action and loftiness of aim, preserve for him ever his exalted position, made brilliant by the fires of genius and perpetuated by the force of truth.

Chateaubriand was born at St. Malo in September, 1768, and died in Paris, after an active and most eventful career, on the fourth of July, 1848. The earlier portion of his life was passed in the quiet of his home at Combourg. At the termination of his collegiate training at Dole and Rennes, he entered the army, in which he soon gained promotion. At about the age of nineteen he was presented at court, became acquainted with the fashionable world, and was received and welcomed into the choicest literary circles of Paris, where he gained the friendship of La Harpe, Fontanes, Malesherbes, and others among the distinguished savants of that period. It was a troubled and stormy epoch in France. The social and political forces which culminated in the great Revolution were beginning to be seriously felt, and faction, turbulence and anarchy were already rife in Paris when Chateaubriand left his native shores for America, moved by a desire to discover the northwest passage, but also with an attendant purpose, long cherished, of observing the mode of life and studying the characteristics of the aborigines, for the purpose of embodying in his writings the impressions thus gained of man in a primitive condition.

From this period to the time of his death his life was a singular series of vicissitudes—at one time the brilliant and revered statesman, at another the voluntary abdicator of all his rights and honors; and even, at one bitter passage of his existence, living in an unwarmed London garret and obtaining a precarious livelihood by giving lessons in his native tongue and translating for the booksellers.

The utter upheaval of affairs in France brought the greatest distress upon himself, his family and his immediate friends, and, with the sensitive heart of genius, the blows which had fallen so keenly doubtless engendered the melancholy cast with which his writings are sometimes tinged. His first work, an idyllic poem, showed little of the genius so finely developed in after years; but his finest literary productions—"The Martyrs," "The Last of the Abencerages" and "The Genius of Christianity," to which "Atala" and "René" properly belong—remain a splendid monument to his powers and exhibit his earnest desire to be numbered among the benefactors and enlighteners of mankind.

The present work, "Atala," is the gathered fruit of his previous studies amid the wilds of America. It abounds in sparkling description, romantic incident and sentiments tender and heroic. It is pervaded by purity of tone and elevation of thought, qualities the more commendable and marked because produced in an age proverbially lax and frivolous.

The illustrations of M. Doré have given an additional value to this tale, so simple, so unsophisticated, yet blooming with all the wild luxuriance of nature. The artist has added his gifts to those of the poet; and those acquainted only with his ready and original powers as the delineator of farce and drollery, or of the exceptionally tragic and horrible, will find new cause for admiration in these quiet renderings of the primeval beauties of the American wild—its plains and forests, its still lagoons and roaring cataracts, its mountain slopes and deep defiles—all its aspects of rudest workmanship—and will welcome these efforts of his genius in the lovely realm of descriptive art, wedded as they are to the exquisite simplicity of this Indian romance. As in his other works, here may be noted the same surpassing fertility of resource, the same alertness of intellect and readiness and swiftness of touch; but there may also be found new proofs of his complete sympathy with all that is picturesque in forest beauty and his high intuitive perception of every possible phase of nature in her wildest caprice and most tender bloom.

We append the following extracts from different prefaces to the author's writings, as constituting what is explanatory of the story that follows:

[From the Preface to the First Edition.]

"I was still very young when I conceived the idea of composing an epic on 'The Man of Nature,' to depict the manners of savages, by uniting them with some well-known event. After the discovery of America, I saw no subject more interesting, especially to Frenchmen, than the massacre of the Natchez colony in Louisiana, in 1727. All the Indian