The _Martyrs_ appeared in 1809. It was designed as a great example of that art, inspired by Christianity, on behalf of which he had contended in the _Genie_; the religion of Christ, he would prove, can create passions and types of character better suited for noble imaginative treatment than those of paganism; its supernatural marvels are more than a compensation for the loss of pagan mythology. The time chosen for his epopee in prose is the reign of the persecutor Diocletian; Rome and the provinces of the Empire, Gaul, Egypt, the deserts of the Thebaid, Jerusalem, Sparta, Athens, form only portions of the scene; heaven and hell are open to the reader, but Chateaubriand, whose faith was rather a sentiment than a passion, does not succeed in making his supernatural habitations and personages credible even to the fancy. Far more admirable are many of the terrestrial scenes and narrations, and among these, in particular the story of Eudore. In the course of the travels which led him to Jerusalem, Chateaubriand had visited Spain, and it was his recollections of the Alhambra that moved him to write, about 1809, the _Aventures du Dernier des Abencerages_, published many years later. It shows a tendency towards self-restraint, excellent in itself, but not entirely in harmony with his effusive imagination. With this work Chateaubriand's inventive period of authorship closed; the rest of his life was in the main that of a politician. From the position of an unqualified royalist (1814-24) he advanced to that of a liberal, and after 1830 may be described as both royalist and republican. His pamphlet of 1814, _De Bonaparte et des Bourbons_, was declared by Louis XVIII. to be worth an army to his cause. In his later years he published an _Essai sur la Litterature Anglaise_ and a translation of "Paradise Lost." But his chief task was the revision of the _Memoires d'Outre-Tombe_, an autobiography designed for posthumous publication, and actually issued in the pages of the _Presse_, through the indiscreet haste of the publishers, while Chateaubriand was still living. Its egotism, its vanity, its malicious wit, its fierce reprisals on those whom the writer regarded as his enemies, its many beauties, its brilliance of style, make it an exposure of all that was worst and much of what was best in his character and genius. Tended by his old friend Mme. Recamier, to whom, if to any one, he was sincerely attached, Chateaubriand died in the summer of 1848. His tomb is on the rocky islet of Grand-Be, off the coast of Brittany.