Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb

Written for posthumous issue and first published from 1848, these memoirs follow Chateaubriand from a Breton childhood at Combourg through the Revolution, a journey in America, exile in London, service and rupture under Napoleon, and the Restoration years of ambassadorships and opposition. Literary work, love affairs, and the funerals of an age sit beside portraits of courts and emigres. The narrator addresses posterity as if already dead. The book is a long autobiographical testimony of the revolutionary and imperial decades, not a novel and not a single diplomatic history.

Bound in red cloth cover blocked with a pattern in brown and gold. Frontispiece and 12 pages of coloured plates, 8 black & white integrated images. Handwriting printed light brown endpapers. Red slipcase.