In the winter of 1898, I spent two months at the house of my kinsman, David Teixeira de Mattos, in Amsterdam. It stands on one of the oldest of the canals. It is a quaint, spacious seventeenth-century house, and the habits of the house are of the same date as the architecture: there are few books in it. Knowing this, I had brought books with me, but not enough to last out my stay; and, before very long, I was driven to rummage in the one small, old-fashioned book-case which contained David Teixeira's library. I found it to consist in the main of volumes bearing upon the history of the reigning House of Orange, in whose restoration my kinsman's near predecessors had been concerned; of family records; of the Dutch poets of the early nineteenth century: until, suddenly, I came across a poor little pirated edition of Chateaubriand's masterpiece, printed in Brussels in twenty small parts, and bound up into five small volumes. I carried them to my room, spent three weeks in their perusal, started to read them a second time, and came back to London determined to find a publisher who would undertake the risk of an English translation. I found one at almost the first asking, and it will ever remain a mystery to me why no complete translation of this admirable work has seen the light in England during the more than fifty years that have elapsed since the _Mémoires d'outre-tombe_ were first published. * The British Museum Library contains two attempts at a translation. One, published in the "Parlour Library of Instruction," is entitled, "_An Autobiography._ By François René, Viscount de Chateaubriand. London and Belfast: Simms & M'Intyre, 1849." It consists of four slim volumes containing in all less than half of the work. The other appeared, under the title of "_Memoirs of Chateaubriand._ Written by Himself. London: Henry Colburn, 1848-49. To be completed in ten parts," in "Colburn's Standard Library." Only three parts were published, embracing not more than a quarter of the _Mémoires d'Outre-tombe._ In both cases the translator is anonymous; in both cases the translation seems careless and hastily made; in both cases the English version, as I have said, is far from complete. * The present translation, by arrangement with the publishers, is complete in so far that no attempt whatever has been made at compression or condensation; nor has a single passage been omitted without the insertion of a footnote pointing out exactly where the omission occurs. The omissions are very few, and consist of the following: 1. All that portion of Chateaubriand's account of the career of Napoleon Bonaparte which touches the period during which the author was not himself residing in France and which is of historical rather than autobiographical interest. This portion Messrs. Freemantle hope to publish later, as a supplemental volume to the Memoirs. Left where it stood, it hampered the action of the work, and its omission is in no way noticeable.