Of aristocratic birth, François-René de Chateaubriand’s life spanned the age before the French Revolution, and the age following it. Known today as a father of Romanticism, he loathed Napoleon’s despotism but was attracted by his eminence. He also dreamed of finding the Northwest Passage and writes of visiting George Washington, which is disputed. The excerpt below follows Chateaubriand’s visit to Niagara Falls in 1791 when he accidentally ‘falls by the edge of the abyss’ and spends 12 days recovering with a fractured arm attended to by his ‘Indian doctors’.
Civilized nations, to preserve their country’s
memories, have the mnemonics of writing and the arts; they have cities,
palaces, towers, columns, and obelisks; they have the scarring of the plow on
formerly cultivated fields; their names are carved in bronze and marble, and
their actions are inscribed in books.
Not so for the peoples of the wilderness: their names are not written on
the trees; their hut, built in a matter of hours, may disappear in a manner of
moments; their labor hardly grazes the earth and cannot even raise a furrow. Their traditional songs fade with the last
memory that retains them. The tribes of
the New World have only one monument: their graves. Take the bones of the fathers from these
savages and you take their history, their lives, and even their gods; you rob
these men, and their future generations, of the proof that they ever existed or
that they were ever annihilated.[1]
Chateaubriand,
Memoirs from Beyond the Grave (1848)
[1] François-René de Chateaubraind, Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, 1768-1800, tr. Alex Andriesse (New York: New York Review of Books, 2018), p. 302.
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