[THE TRANSLATOR'S NOTE]
Many years ago, M. Pierre Louÿs, who had not then achieved his astonishing successes, and I sat talking literature in a Paris café. The future author of Aphrodite had praise for none save the moderns, of whom he has now become a recognized type and leader. I turned to him suddenly and asked:
"Is there any nineteenth-century French writer at all whom you others read nowadays and approve of?"
"Yes," said Louÿs, "Chateaubriand."
"How do you mean?" said I. "The novels? Atala? The essays?"
"Ah no," he answered: "but the Mémoires d'outre-tombe, yes. That—that is monumental; that will live for ever."
Our talk drifted to other things; I remembered what Louis had said—for two days: had I come across these Memoirs in the course of my rambles along the quays, I should have bought them; I did not, and bought other books instead.
*
In the winter of 1898, I spent two months at the house of my kinsman, David Teixeira de Mattos, in Amsterdam. It stands on one of the oldest of the canals. It is a quaint, spacious seventeenth-century house, and the habits of the house are of the same date as the architecture: there are few books in it. Knowing this, I had brought books with me, but not enough to last out my stay; and, before very long, I was driven to rummage in the one small, old-fashioned book-case which contained David Teixeira's library. I found it to consist in the main of volumes bearing upon the history of the reigning House of Orange, in whose restoration my kinsman's near predecessors had been concerned; of family records; of the Dutch poets of the early nineteenth century: until, suddenly, I came across a poor little pirated edition of Chateaubriand's masterpiece, printed in Brussels in twenty small parts, and bound up into five small volumes. I carried them to my room, spent three weeks in their perusal, started to read them a second time, and came back to London determined to find a publisher who would undertake the risk of an English translation.