describing his sister Lucile
in the Amelie of the story, and much is obviously descriptive of his own
early surroundings. With _Les Natchez_ his career as an imaginative
writer is closed. In 1831 he published his _Etudes ou discours
historiques_ ... (4 vols.) dealing with the fall of the Roman Empire.

As a politician Chateaubriand was equally formidable to his antagonists
when in opposition and to his friends when in office. His poetical
receptivity and impressionableness rendered him no doubt honestly
inconsistent with himself; his vanity and ambition, too morbidly acute
to be restrained by the ties of party allegiance, made him dangerous and
untrustworthy as a political associate. He was forbidden to deliver the
address he had prepared (1811) for his reception to the Academy on M.J.
Chenier on account of the bitter allusions to Napoleon contained in it.
From this date until 1814 Chateaubriand lived in seclusion at the
Vallee-aux-loups, an estate he had bought in 1807 at Aulnay. His
pamphlet _De Bonaparte, des Bourbons, et de la necessite de se rattier a
nos princes legitimes_, published on the 31st of March 1814, the day of
the entrance of the allies into Paris, was as opportune in the moment of
its appearance as the _Genie du christianisme_, and produced a hardly
less signal effect. Louis XVIII. declared that it had been worth a
hundred thousand men to him. Chateaubriand, as minister of the interior,
accompanied him to Ghent during the Hundred Days, and for a time
associated himself with the excesses of the royalist reaction. Political
bigotry, however, was not among his faults; he rapidly drifted into
liberalism and opposition, and was disgraced in September 1816 for his
pamphlet _De la monarchie selon la charte_. He had to sell his library
and his house of the Vallee-aux-loups.

After the fall of his opponent, the due Decazes, Chateaubriand obtained
the Berlin embassy (1821), from which he was transferred to London
(1822), and he also acted as French plenipotentiary at the Congress of
Verona (1822). He here made himself mainly responsible for the
iniquitous invasion of Spain--an expedition undertaken, as he himself
admits, with the idea of restoring French prestige by a military parade.
He next received the portfolio of foreign affairs, which he soon lost by
his desertion of his colleagues on the question of a reduction of the
interest on the national debt. After another interlude of effective
pamphleteering in o