Word: chateaubriands
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...announced, explaining his choices of Debussy, Bach, Rachmaninoff, Mozart and Schubert. "I believe in musical digestion. If you start with light pieces and play a 45-minute sonata after the interlude, it's like starting dinner with hors d'oeuvres and dessert and finishing with a Chateaubriand and vegetables...
NONFICTION: Coming into the Country, John McPhee ∙ Dispatches, Michael Herr ∙ Chateaubriand. George D. Painter ∙ A Place for Noah, Josh Greenfeld ∙ And I Worked at the Writer's Trade, Malcom Cowley
...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...
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...
...Allegheny Mountains. Encounters with Indian maidens and frontier moonlight enlivened his novels René 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 émigré princes. But the cause was hopeless, and he fled in exile to England. There he will languish until Volume...