Mention that you’ve been reading Chateaubriand’s memoir, and chances are that you’ll soon find yourself talking about steak. But back in his day (the early nineteenth century), François-René de Chateaubriand was known for much more than his predilection for beef tenderloin with a wine reduction sauce. Chateaubriand was an early traveller to America (where he claimed to have met with George Washington), as well as being an eyewitness to the horrors of the French Revolution. During the worst years of the Revolution he lived in exile (and poverty) in England. Chateaubriand’s first published works were bestsellers in France, and after his return to that country he became a favourite of Napoleon, who eventually appointed him the French ambassador to England. Chateaubriand’s memoir was a late-in-life attempt to cash in on his fame: he sold the as-yet-incomplete manuscript to a publisher, on the condition that it not be published until after his death (hence the title: Memoirs from Beyond the Grave). The American novelist Paul Auster considers Chateaubriand’s memoir to be “the best autobiography ever written,” and the New York Review of Books has just republished the first volume, in a new translation by Alex Andriesse. Here’s Chateaubriand recalling winter evenings from his boyhood, when he lived with his family in a gloomy and isolated castle in Combourg, Brittany: “[After dinner] I huddled by the fireside with [my sister] Lucille, while the servants cleared the table and retired for the night. It was then that my father began a stroll that did not cease until he went to bed. He was dressed in a thick white woolen gown, or rather a sort of cloak, which I have never seen on anybody but him, and he covered his half-bald head with a tall white cap that stood straight up. When, in the course of this stroll, he moved away from the hearth, the vast hall was so dimly lit, by a single candle, that he was no longer visible. Only his footsteps could still be heard in the darkness. Then, slowly, he would return to the light, emerging little by little from the shadows, like a specter, with his white gown, his white cap, and his long pale face.” Reading passages like this are like looking through an open window into a bygone era.