But Chateaubriand was himself too supremely an egotist to be securely attached to another egotist's interest by any flattery that could be bestowed upon him. When, at the word of Napoleon, the Duke d'Enghien was murdered, Chateaubriand--let him have the credit of his high spirit--resigned his office and separated himself from the tyrant who had conferred it. Chateaubriand's first happy synchronism with the course of events was his publishing the "Genius of Christianity" when he did. His second was his publishing the pamphlet "Bonaparte and the Bourbons" at the very moment when that restoration impended which raised Louis XVIII. to the throne of France. The new monarch acknowledged that Chateaubriand's book had been worth an army to his cause. Chateaubriand prolonged his literary career to a great age, enjoying almost to the end an undisputed supremacy among the authors of France. There has seldom been a more uncloudedly, more dazzlingly, brilliant contemporary success achieved by any writer of any age or any nation. The renown continues, but the splendor of the renown has passed away. Why? Our answer is, Chateaubriand's writing is vitiated by a vein of unreality, of falseness, running through it. This character in his writing but reflected, we fear, a character in the writer. There is ground for suspecting that Chateaubriand was at heart lacking in genuineness. It was inseparable defect in the man that gave that hollow ring to the words. It is but a just reprisal upon Chateaubriand that his literary fame should suffer by the fault detected in his personal character. A man's words are seldom in the long run more weighty than the man. Chateaubriand was a kind of continuer and modifier of a celebrated French writer that preceded him. He was a better-bred, a much purified, an aristocratic Rousseau. He may be pronounced second greatest in the succession of the literary sentimentalists of France. Rene Francois Augustus, Viscount de Chateaubriand, to give him now his full name and title, lived a life replete with adventure and vicissitude. At twenty-three years of age he fled from the horrors of the French Revolution to travel in America and to find a north-west passage to the Polar Sea. He called, with a letter of introduction, on President Washington, to whose prudent dissuasion of the young man from his project of arctic exploration, founded on the difficulty of the task, Chateaubriand had the French readiness, together with the necessary egotism, to make the complimentary reply: "But, sir, my task is not so difficult as yours was, that of creating a state." In his posthumous biography, the "_Memoirs d'Outre Tombe_" [Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb], Chateaubriand, alluding to this interview of his with Washington, said, sententiously and loftily, "There is a virtue in the look of a great man."