"If I die, Celuta, you may after my death unite yourself with a more tranquil soul than mine. But do not believe that you can accept with impunity the caresses of another man, or that weaker embraces can efface those of René from your soul. I have pressed you to my heart in the midst of the desert and in the hurricane; the day when I bore you across the stream, it was in my mind to plunge my dagger into your heart in order to secure that heart's happiness, and to punish myself for having given you this happiness. It is thou, O supreme Being, the source of love and happiness, it is thou alone who hast made me what I am, and only thou canst understand me! Oh, why did I not fling myself into the foaming waters of the torrent! I should then have returned to the bosom of nature with all my energies unimpaired. "Yes, Celuta, if you lose me you will remain a widow. Who else could surround you with the flame which radiates from me even when I do not love? The lonely spots to which I imparted the warmth of love, would seem icy cold to you by the side of another mate. What would you seek in the shades of the forest? For you there is no rapture, no intoxication, no delirium left. I robbed you of all this in giving you it all, or rather in giving nothing, for an incurable wound burned in my inmost soul.... I am weary of life, a weariness which has always consumed me. I am left untouched by all that interests other men. If I had been a shepherd or a king, what should I have done with my shepherd's crook or my crown? Glory and genius, work and leisure, prosperity and adversity, would weary me alike. I have found society and nature irksome in Europe as in America. I take no pleasure in my virtue, and should feel no remorse were I a criminal. I would that I had never been born, or that I were eternally forgotten."[2] Thus powerfully was the dissonance first sounded which was afterwards repeated with so many variations by the authors of the "Satanic" school. Not satisfied with depicting, with a sure hand and in the grand style, a self-idolatry bordering upon insanity, Chateaubriand throws it into relief on the dark background of a sister's guilty passion. So impelled is he to make René irresistibly seductive, that he does not rest until he has inspired his own sister with an unnatural love for him. This criminal attachment between brother and sister was a subject which occupied men's minds considerably at that time. Not many years previously, Goethe, in his _Wilhelm Meister_, had made Mignon the fruit of a sinister union between brother and sister; and both Shelley and Byron treated the same subject in Rosalind and _Helen, The Revolt of Islam, Cain_, and _Manfred_. It was a favourite theory with the young revolutionary school that the horror of incest between brother and sister was merely based upon prejudice.