Lingering Romance

By Annalyn Swan

CHATEAUBRIAND by George D. Painter

Knopf; 327 pages; $15

Byron may have inspired the image of the archromantic. But it was Franc,ois-Rene de Chateaubriand--writer, politician and Olympian lover--who lived it. Born in 1768 to a minor Breton nobleman, he came of age with the French Revolution. By the time he was 24, the Chevalier Chateaubriand had already journeyed to America in search of noble savages and exotic flora.

Later, as a novelist, he helped fuel the age of French romanticism; as a polemicist he daringly attacked Napoleon; as a politician he served as Louis XVIII's foreign minister. En route, he out-Byroned Byron; few of Europe's great beauties--or, possibly, his sister--could resist the arrogant, magnetic aristocrat.

Across the ocean, Chateaubriand was less successful. Few Americans had heard of him in his own century; today the English-speaking world tends to associate the name with an expensive steak dish (created by a chef during Chateaubriand's brief sojourn as ambassador to England). British Biographer George Painter attempts to resurrect the legend by resuscitating the man. Author of a highly acclaimed and exhaustively researched biography of Proust, Painter has produced the first part of a projected three-volume study. Like its predecessor, it promises to be a model of organization and insight.

The Longed-For Tempests, which chronicles Chateaubriand's first 25 years, begins with his birth during a violent storm at St.-Malo, a granite fortress of a town on the coast of Brittany. At Combourg, the family's gloomy, turreted castle, Chateaubriand grew into moody adolescence, given to sentimental verse and melancholy posturing. But Paris beckoned. There he witnessed, along with "fashionable spectators and lovely ladies who drove up in their carriages," the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789.

Disillusion was immediate. "The severed heads changed my political disposition," recalled Chateaubriand, until then a disciple of Rousseau and a believer in the brotherhood of man. Rather than join the exodus of conspiring nobles, he conjured up his own plot: a voyage to America. "What's the use of emigrating from France? I'm emigrating from the world," he declared. Another storm followed him to sea; he had himself lashed to the mast and shouted his delight to the elements. His fellow passengers thought him mad--and they may have been right.

In America the tourist wandered through Philadelphia, then journeyed down the Ohio River across the wilderness and back through the Allegheny Mountains. Encounters with Indian maidens and frontier moonlight enlivened his novels Rene and Atala and gave many Europeans new notions of the New World. The fantastic journey ended one night in a backwoods millhouse, where the fire illuminated an old newspaper headline: FLIGHT OF THE KING. Chateaubriand raced to Europe to join the army of the emigre princes. But the cause was hopeless, and he fled in exile to England. There he will languish until Volume II.

Painter, a former assistant curator at the British Museum, is steeped in the scholar's method: he delights in being first to puzzle out his subject's exact American itinerary, in describing family disputes and royal travail. Such minute footnote work suited the intricacies of Remembrance of Things Past; Chateaubriand's oeuvre seems too fragile a foundation for a three-volume edifice. Still, the man's life is his greatest work, and Painter's lively style illuminates its dark recesses as well as its public displays. The first book, at least, perfectly reflects its subject: in The Longed-For Tempests, romance lingers, adventure lives.

-- Annalyn Swan

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