On April 18, 1802, the Concordat was celebrated with high solemnities; the Archbishop of Paris received the First Consul within the portals of Notre-Dame. It was the fitting moment for the publication of the _Genie du Christianisme_. Its value as an argumentative defence of Christianity may not be great; but it was the restoration of religion to art, it contained or implied a new system of aesthetics, it was a glorification of devout sentiment, it was a pompous manifesto of romanticism, it recovered a lost ideal of beauty. From Ronsard to Chenier the aim of art had been to imitate the ancients, while imitating or interpreting life. Let us be national, let us be modern, let us therefore be Christians, declared Chateaubriand, and let us seek for our tradition in the great Christian ages. It was a revolution in art for which he pleaded, and throughout the first half of the nineteenth century the revolution was in active progress. The episode of _Rene_, which was included in the _Genie_, and afterwards published separately, has been described as a Christianised _Werther_; its passion is less frank, and even more remote from sanity of feeling, than that of Goethe's novel, but the sadness of the hero is more magnificently posed. A sprightly English lady described Chateaubriand as "wearing his heart in a sling"; he did so during his whole life; and through Rene we divine the inventor of Rene carrying his wounded heart, as in the heroine we can discern some features of his sister Lucile. In all his writings his feelings centre in himself: he is a pure egoist through his sensibility; but around his own figure his imagination, marvellous in its expansive power, can deploy boundless perspectives. Both _Atala_ and _Rene_, though brought into connection with the _Genie du Christianisme_, are in fact more closely related to the prose epic _Les Natchez_, written early, but held in reserve until the publication of his collected works in 1826-31. _Les Natchez_, inspired by Chateaubriand's American travels, idealises the life of the Red Indian tribes. The later books, where he escapes from the pseudo-epic manner, have in them the finest spirit of his early years, his splendour and delicacy of description, his wealth of imaginative reverie. Famous as the author of the _Genie_, Chateaubriand was appointed secretary to the embassy at Rome. The murder of the Duc d'Enghien alienated him from Napoleon. Putting aside the _Martyrs_, on which he had been engaged, he sought for fresh imagery and local colour to enrich his work, in a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, a record of which was published in his (1811) _Itineraire de Paris a Jerusalem_.