Written over the course of four decades, Fran ois-Renede Chateaubriand’s epic autobiography has drawn theadmiration of Baudelaire, Flaubert, Proust, Barthes, andSebald. Here, in the first books of his massive Memoirs,spanning the years 1768 to 1800, Chateaubriand looksback on the already bygone world of his youth. Herecounts the history of his aristocratic family and the firstrumblings of the French Revolution. He recalls playinggames on the beaches of Saint-Malo, wandering in thewoods near his father’s castle in Combourg, hunting withKing Louis XVI at Versailles, witnessing the first headscarried on pikes through the streets of Paris, meetingwith George Washington in Philadelphia, and fallinghopelessly in love with a young woman named Charlottein the small Suffolk town of Bungay. The volume endswith Chateaubriand’s return to France after seven yearsof exile in England.

In this new edition (the first unabridged Englishtranslation of any portion of the Memoirs to be publishedin more than a century), Chateaubriand emerges as awriter of great wit and clarity, a self deprecating egotistwhose meditations on the meaning of history, memory,and morality are leavened with a mixture of high whimsyand memorable gloom.