We have here an exceptional character encountering an exceptional destiny. And it is from this character that the melancholy and misanthropy of the new literature may be said to emanate. This melancholy and this misanthropy differ from any previously known. Molière's Alceste, for instance, the finest and most profound of his masculine characters, is only misanthropical in so far that he is troubled to the depths of his being by the meanness, the servility, the frivolous or cowardly duplicity which prevail at a corrupt and worldly court; but he is not melancholy, there is nothing morbid in his temperament, he does not bear the mark of Cain upon his brow. The melancholy of the early nineteenth century partakes of the nature of a disease; and it is not a disease which attacks a single individual or a single nation only, it is an epidemic which spreads from people to people, in the manner of those religious manias which so often spread over Europe in the Middle Ages. René's is merely the first and most marked case of the disease in the form in which it attacked the most gifted intellects. René bears that mark of Cain already alluded to, which is, withal, the mark of the ruler. The seal of genius, invisible to himself, has been set on his brow. Behind the mournful self-accusations of which his confession consists, lies the proud feeling of superiority which filled the writer's breast. If we read Chateaubriand's _Mémoires_ attentively, we cannot resist the impression that the fiction of Amélie's love for René veils a kind of confession, an admission of the passionate love his sister Lucile cherished for her remarkable brother. How much in the way of confession may not the remainder of the book contain?