At seventeen he already seemed worn with the fatigue of unsatisfied dreaming, before he had begun to know life. A commission in the army was procured for him. He saw, interested yet alien in heart, something of literary life in Paris; then in Revolution days (1791) he quitted France, and, with the dream of discovering the North-West Passage, set sail to America. If he did not make any geographical discovery, Chateaubriand found his own genius in the western world. The news of the execution of Louis XVI. decided him to return; a Breton and a royalist should show himself among the ranks of the emigrants. To gratify the wish of his family, he married before crossing the frontier. Madame de Chateaubriand had the dignity to veil her sorrow caused by an imperfect union, and at a later time she won such a portion of her husband's regard as he could devote to another than himself. The episode of war having soon closed--not without a wound and a serious illness--he found a refuge in London, enduring dire poverty, but possessing the consolation of friendship with Joubert and Fontanes, and there he published in 1797 his first work, the _Essai sur les Revolutions_. The doctrine of human progress had been part of the religion of the eighteenth century; Chateaubriand in 1797 had faith neither in social, nor political, nor religious progress. Why be deceived by the hopes of revolution, since humanity can only circle for ever through an exhausting round of illusions? The death of his mother and words of a dying sister awakened him from his melancholy mood; he resolved to write a second book, which should correct the errors of the first, and exhibit a source of hope and joy in religion. To the eighteenth century Christianity had appeared as a gross and barbarous superstition; he would show that it was a religion of beauty, the divine mother of poetry and of art, a spring of poetic thought and feeling alike through its dogma and its ritual; he would convert literature from its decaying cult of classicism, and restore to honour the despised Middle Ages. The _Genie du Christianisme_, begun during its author's residence in London, was not completed until four years later. In 1801, detaching a fragment from his poetic apology for religion, he published his _Atala, ou les Amours de Deux Sauvages dans le Desert_. It is a romance, or rather a prose poem, in which the magic of style, the enchantment of descriptive power, the large feeling for nature, the sensibility to human passion, conceal many infirmities of design and of feeling. Chateaubriand suddenly entered into his fame.