In _Atala_ Chactas had told René the story of his life; now René in return relates his past history to Chactas. He describes his childhood in the old manor-house of the remote province, he tells how ill at ease and repressed he felt in the presence of his father, and how he was only happy in the society of his sister Amélie. Brother and sister, both by nature melancholy, and both poetically inclined, are early left orphans and obliged to quit their home. René's great longing is for the peace of the cloister; but he is changeable in his longings; they presently take the form of a desire to travel. This desire he gratifies. He finds food for his melancholy among the ruins of Greece and Rome, and discovers as much forgetfulness of the dead among living peoples as upon the soil of past nations; the workmen whom he questions in the streets of London know nothing of that Charles the Second at the foot of whose statue they stand. What, then, is the value of fame? He travels to Scotland to live in the memory of the heroes of Morven, and finds herds of cattle grazing on the spots where Ossian sang and Fingal conquered. He returns to Italy and studies its monuments of art, but finds that for all his pains he has learned nothing. Past and Present are two incomplete statues; the one has been dug up from the earth in a mutilated condition, the other stands unfinished, and can only be completed by the Future. Nature has as little power as history to soothe his disordered soul. He climbs Mount Etna, and, standing on its summit, sees on one side the sun rise above the horizon, with the whole of Sicily spread out far beneath, surrounded by the great sea, and looking so small that its rivers resemble the lines on a map; on the other side he looks down into the crater of the volcano, with its burning glow and its black smoke. This situation he considers to be exactly typical of his own character and life. "All my life long," he says, "I have had a widespread and yet insignificantly small world before my eyes, and at my side a yawning abyss."