Thus, in my rendering, Chateaubriand may occasionally sound like Cioran (who called him “a sonorous Pascal”), or Baudelaire (who called him “one of t… - François-Auguste-René de Chateaubriand

On se réconcilie avec un ennemi qui nous est inférieur pour les qualités du coeur ou de l'esprit ; on ne pardonne jamais à celui qui nous surpasse par l'âme et le génie.

I halt at the beginning of my travels, in Pennsylvania, in order to compare Washington and Bonaparte. I would rather not have concerned myself with them until the point where I had met Napoleon; but if I came to the edge of my grave without having reached the year 1814 in my tale, no one would then know anything of what I would have written concerning these two representatives of Providence. I remember Castelnau: like me Ambassador to England, who wrote like me a narrative of his life in London. On the last page of Book VII, he says to his son: ‘I will deal with this event in Book VIII,’ and Book VIII of Castelnau’s Memoirs does not exist: that warns me to take advantage of being alive.

Taken collectively, the people are a poet, at once author and ardent actor of the part they play, or the part they are made to play. Their excesses come not so much from instinctual or inborn cruelty as from the unpredictable delirium of a crowd intoxicated by spectacles,