Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe
Copy of the first printing, complete with the publisher's foreword, the list of subscribers and Chateaubriand's letter to Delloye, and showing the pagination error in volume II (p. 164 instead of p. 364). These leaves were removed when the remainder of the edition was transferred to the bookseller Dion-Lambert.
Certainly Chateaubriand’s most modern and most admired work, begun in 1809 and pursued relentlessly over the following decades, the writing of the Mémoires was completed in 1841, though Chateaubriand continued to revise it until his death in July 1848. First serialized in La Presse, it appeared in book form beginning in January 1849.
Blending youthful memories, portraits, meditations and judgments on the events and figures of his time, the Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe stand as autobiography, historical fresco and metaphysical reflection all at once. “Chateaubriand’s work and personality dominate the entire literary nineteenth century… A new manner of feeling and thinking, of expressing and understanding. He opened the age of Romanticism” (Talvart). From Barbey d’Aurevilly, who claimed Chateaubriand was born “with a star upon his head,” to Proust, who saw in it an unequaled model, the Mémoires are universally recognized as one of the founding texts of literary modernity, inaugurating the era of modern autobiography.
A fine copy, remarkably fresh and beautifully bound: it comes from the Cabinet des livres of Pierre Brossette (Paris, Christie’s, 2025, no. 55).
“Ouvrage très important, fort recherché, et très littéraire,” Carteret, Le Trésor du bibliophile, I, p. 163; Vicaire, II, 290; En français dans le texte, 268. “One of the most important texts of nineteenth-century literature,” Clouzot, 66; Talvart, III, p. 16; Rahir, Bibliothèque de l’amateur, 366.