[1] This book was written at the Vallée-aux-Loups between October 1811 and June 1812.—T.
[2] Seven miles south of Paris, in the Department of Seine.—T.
[3] HORACE, Od. I. XI—T.
[4] Voltaire was not born on the 20th of February 1694, and he was not born at Châtenay. In 1864, M. A. Jal (Dictionnaire critique de biographie et d'histoire, pp. 1283, et seq.), after searching the register of the Parish of Saint-André-des-Arcs, established the fact that Voltaire was born in Paris on Sunday, 21 November 1694.—B.
[5] The district now known as Florida was formerly divided into Eastern and Western Florida, with St. Augustine and Pensacola for their respective capitals.—T.
[6] The 4th of October is the feast of St François of Assisi—T.
[7] Chateaubriand made his entrance into Jerusalem on the 4th of October 1806.—B.
[8] Following M. Edmond Biré in his edition of 1899, I have borrowed this paragraph from the manuscript known as the Manuscrit de 1826, which was in the handwriting, for the most part, of Madame Récamier, and which was published by Madame Charles Lenormant in 1874. It is certainly preferable to the paragraph in all other editions of the Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe, which runs as follows:
"My father's birth and the trials of his first position caused his character to become one of the gloomiest ever known. Now this character influenced my ideas because it terrified me in childhood, saddened me in youth, and determined the manner of my education."