Atala. René

The rare first edition of Atala appeared in 1801, and René was published the following year within the Génie du christianisme. The 1805 edition brought these two narratives together for the first time in a single illustrated volume, and includes a forty-six-page preface, itself in first edition, in which Chateaubriand revisits the genesis of the texts, answers his critics and clarifies the framework within which they should be read.

Chateaubriand had begun his literary career by drawing on his travels in America, recounting the landscapes and peoples of the New World. Having left France in 1791, he claimed to have traveled along the banks of the Hudson as far as Albany and the vicinity of Niagara Falls — a romantic quest for the “noble savage” and the solitude of the North American forests that nourished the imaginative world of Atala. From its publication, the narrative achieved immense success and remains inseparable from the celebrated painting executed in 1808 by Anne-Louis Girodet, now held at the Louvre, depicting the dead heroine carried by Chactas and Father Aubry to her burial — a testament to the enormous impact of the story on early nineteenth-century culture.

A good copy in a contemporary binding, on vellum. It is enriched, for Atala, with two additional engravings, engraved by Ambroise Tardieu, captioned in Spanish for an edition we have not been able to identify.