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Chateaubriand, the youngest son of an old Breton aristocratic family, was tormented by two afflictions: an “exceptional nature” and the “fatal gift” of literary transfiguration. To overcome his anguish at a revolutionary moment that threatened his personal and historical identity, he decided to focus primarily on himself, hoping to find salvation in writing, a desperate, sublime, pathetic endeavor to create his very own mausoleum. To achieve this, his unique self, “conversant with the Absolute,” was meant to devour and consume the meager substance of a vanishing world. But lo and behold, the Great Other, “the last great individual existence”, Napoleon Bonaparte, was set before him. There was no alternative for Chateaubriand than to share the mausoleum with the “sun” of the times, “Destiny incarnate,” “the Poet of Action,” whose “shadow will rise alone at the edge of the Old World.” And so the “Memoirs from Beyond the Grave” at last found their true meaning as the ultimate epic in an age of inescapable and prosaic mediocrity.