Having on the 18th Brumaire returned to France, Chateaubriand became with Fontanes, his friend, a companion in exile, one of the proprietors of the _Mercure_, in which paper he published Atala, (so far back as this does the French _feuilleton_ date.) The freshness of the ideas, the grandeur of sentiment, and exquisitely simple style of this book, were novel indeed, at a time when all things were innoculated with the pretence of the Directorate. The success of this prose-poem aptly prepared the public for the immense sensation subsequently created by _le genie du Christianisme_. It may safely be said that no work was ever better timed. The iron grasp of Napoleon had strangled all popular movements, order had succeeded anarchy, temples again were open for prayer, and ruined altars were rebuilt. All the world, weary of the fruitless worship of the personification of abstract and transcendental qualities and virtues, felt an innate longing for a less sterile and more poetical faith. Society hastened to resume that old creed, which had been the source of all the civilization which existed, not it may be true, because of conviction, but because the disgusting orgies at the feet of the statue of the so-called goddess of reason, had offended not only all sentiment but all decency. Never probably before were the fasts and feasts of Christianity so rigidly observed, and all France, by a rigid observance of Lent, sought to atone for and wipe out all remembrance of the reign of terror. With that wonderful sagacity which made Napoleon great in cabinet as he was on the battle-field, he did not neglect Chateaubriand’s book, and rewarded the author by the appointment of Secretary of Embassy to Rome, where the Cardinal Fesch was the French representative. Then, in the eternal city, amid the ruins of the coliseum, yet filled with the spirits of the ancient martyrs, the Christian poet formed a conception of the angelical Cymodocré and Eudoxe, and determined to visit the cradle of Christianity, the triumph and contests of which he resolved to celebrate, and to gather inspiration in the “city of desolation” by contemplating that one sepulchre which when time shall be no more will yield nothing to the great, grand judge.