CHATEAUBRIAND (François-René de). Autograph letter signed "C - Lot 17

CHATEAUBRIAND (François-René de). Autograph letter signed "Chateaubriand" to the Société libre d'émulation de Rouen. Paris, September 2, 1829. 2 pp. in-4; framed under two-sided glass with a steel-engraved portrait after Gustave Staal. "I must begin, Messieurs, by offering you my apologies for taking so long to reply to the letter you did me the honor of writing to me. I have been ill. All I have left today is the widow's denarius [an expression referring to alms given by the poor]. I am only too happy to be able to lay it at the feet of LA STATUE DU GRAND CORNEILLE. I hold 50 francs, Messieurs, at your disposal: J'AI LAISSE MA FORTUNE AVEC LES CENDRES DU POUSSIN, EN TERRE ETRANGERE..." Chateaubriand had just taken up the post of French ambassador to Rome from October 1828 to May 1829. In 1828, the Société libre d'émulation de Rouen had decided to launch a subscription for the erection of a statue of Pierre Corneille, glory of the city. The work of art was sculpted by Pierre-Jean David d'Angers and inaugurated in September 1834 in the presence of King Louis-Philippe I, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Nodier, Casimir Delavigne... CHATEAUBRIAND WAS ONE OF THE MOST ILLUSTRIOUS VISITORS TO THE UNITED STATES. He "spent five months of 1791 in America. Embarking in Saint-Malo on April 8 on the brigantine Saint-Pierre, he reached America in mid-July, returning to France at the end of December. During this time, he saw Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, then New York again, from where he sailed to Albany on the Hudson, to contemplate Niagara Falls. On November 28, 1791, he returned to Philadelphia to embark on the Molly bound for Le Havre. The landscapes and men of the voyage, seen or dreamt of, inspired Atala (1801), René (1802), Les Natchez [written in 1799, published in 1826], certain pages of the Essai sur les Révolutions (1797), the Génie du christianisme (1802), the Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe, and the Voyage en Amérique (1827). From real voyage to plural voyages, the voyage to America is reconstructed in Chateaubriand's work, in several layers of duration that are regions of the same time. An anhistorical time that allows "both the reintegration of the past and the divination or prophecy of the future", literary journeys render several figures and images of the same theme. Les Natchez turns the voyage into a counter-revolutionary epic, corresponding to the reactionary ideology of the Consulate, while the later account of the voyage in Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe restores the hopes of the Enlightenment, culminating in the synthesis of Voyage en Amériques, which opens onto the future of the world" (Emmanuelle Rebardy-Julia).