The mere reader of Chateaubriand's novels generally begins with _Atala_ and _Rene_, and not uncommonly stops there. In a certain sense this reader is wise in his generation. But he will never understand his author as a novelist if he does so; and his appreciation of the books or booklets themselves will be very incomplete. They are both not unfrequently spoken of as detached episodes of the _Genie du Christianisme_; and so they are, in the illustrative sense. They are actually, and in the purely constitutive way, episodes of another book, _Les Natchez_, while this book itself is also a novel "after a sort." The author's work in the kind is completed by the later _Les Martyrs_, which has nothing to do, in persons or time, with the others, being occupied with the end of the third century, while they deal (throwing back a little in _Atala_) with the beginning of the eighteenth. But this also is an illustrative companion or reinforcement of the _Genie_. With that book the whole body of Chateaubriand's fiction[22] is thus directly connected; and the entire collection, not a little supported by the _Voyages_, constitutes a deliberate "literary offensive," intended to counter-work the proceedings of the _philosophes_, though with aid drawn from one of them--Rousseau,--and only secondarily designed to provide pure novel-interest. If this is forgotten, the student will find himself at sea without a rudder; and the mere reader will be in danger of exaggerating very greatly, because he does not in the least understand, the faults just referred to, and of failing altogether to appreciate the real success and merit of the work as judged on that only criterion, "Has the author done what he meant to do, and done it well, on the lines he chose?" Of course, if our reader says, "I don't care about all this, I merely want to be amused and interested," one cannot prevent him. He had, in fact, as was hinted just now, better read nothing but _Atala_ and _Rene_, if not, indeed, _Atala_ only, immense as is the literary importance of its companion. But in a history of the novel one is entitled to hope, at any rate to wish, for a somewhat better kind of customer or client.