La Vie de Rancé had been dictated by Chateaubriand, while sick with gout, from his iron bed in a room in rue du Bac, where the only furniture was a white wooden chest with a broken lock. He mixed quotations from seventeenth-century works, brought to him by a filthy Breton secretary, with his own irrepressible memories, which still poured forth in that further “afterlife,” since his Mémoires d’outre-tombe were now complete and his two faithful assistants, Madame de Chateaubriand and Madame Récamier, were worried their beloved’s imagination no longer had anything to which to apply itself. In the face of this spectral and yet sensual delirium, Sainte-Beuve was able to proclaim to the Swiss, with the brutality of a gossip columnist: “Chateaubriand’s Rancé has been a disappointment.”⁷⁶² Then he explained: “We who are not as compelled as others to respect, due to the distance from which we are speaking, have to say frankly that this book, which we expected to be so simple and austere, has become, through lack of seriousness and through negligence, a real bric-à-brac; the author throws everything into it, jumbles everything, and empties all his cupboards.”⁷⁶³ He continued sardonically: “The most charming, the most extravagant images assail us at every moment and emerge in every corner, from behind every pillar of the cloister, which prompted one witty soul to comment the other day that it was indeed a temptation of Saint Anthony, such are the devils that we meet there, and what pretty devils! At certain points one might think there are passageways running from La Trappe straight to the wings of the Opéra.”⁷⁶⁴

Nor were the Trappists very pleased: there was nothing pious about that book written for the glory of their great founder and for the author’s penitence. On the contrary, it hurled demons at La Trappe. The secretary of the abbey saw beneath it “the reckless belief in certain slanderous and improbable tales.” Abbé Dubois, the austere biographer of Rancé, accused Chateaubriand of perverse obstinacy in rejecting whatever “doesn’t fit in with his story.”⁷⁶⁵ And that was true: La Vie de Rancé, Chateaubriand’s last foray, has nothing of the edifying biography about it. They are pages that mark a final act of surrender to wild association, a corrupt rummaging among his own memories and a shuffling of shadows, among the debris of time. Their course is abrupt, intemperate, erratic. One finds there the effort of the virtuous pensum and the attraction of a flowing monologue. Its prose brings together stones—facts, quotations, and recollections—held together only by moss. With no concern for progression, it passes from undulating softness to cruel sharp perspectives. This book—dedicated to the person who had dared to write “We live to die; God’s design, when he gives us the joy of light, is to take it away from us”—expresses a consummate regret for every lost moment of life and leaves a sensation incompatible with tranquillity. It is a farewell that, behind the penitence, seeks out the recollection of sin. Nothing is as troubled as the restlessness and tedium of an old man.