CHATEAUBRIAND (François-René de). Autograph letter [to the Duchess of Duras]. La Vallée-aux-Loups [present-day Hauts-de-Seine department], November 1, 1811. 4 pp. in-8. "REALLY, MADAME, I DON'T KNOW WHAT MY LAST LETTER WAS MORE KIND THAN THE OTHERS. DID I SEEM TO LOVE YOU MORE IN IT? That may be, since friendship, they say, increases with age. I THINK I'M BECOMING THE BEST MAN ON EARTH. I'M RAMBLING A BIT; MY HAIR IS TURNING WHITE AND SOON I'LL BE LED AROUND BY THE NOSE OR SOMETHING. But the hardest thing is that I've completely forgotten how to write, and my hand shakes so badly that I can't form my letters. How about a tragedy? Haven't I told you a hundred times that I'm going to write one? That it was called MOYSE AU MONT SINAÏ and that I had two complete acts? I'll add that I think these two acts are excellent, and I'm like m[a]d[am]e de Staël. Well, sometimes I have to boast. But rest assured. IF MY TRAGEDY IS NOT A MASTERPIECE, IF IT DOESN'T PUT ME IN THE FIRST ROW, I WILL THROW IT IN THE FIRE WITHOUT HESITATION, since, after all, that's not where my glory lies. You've been reassured. Incidentally, I wrote verse for twenty years of my life before I wrote a line of prose, so this is not my first try at the instrument. But it's a terrible task to have to juggle dramatic interest, characters, passions and style. I had no idea how heavy this burden was until I tried to lift it. In eight months of continuous work, I could only manage two acts. Our modern tragics are quicker on the uptake. Now you may ask, how can there be tragedy in Moyse at Mount Sinai? That's my secret, which I dare not hazard to the post office. You'll see this winter. We will therefore forgive M. de L... [the Duc Gaston-Pierre-Marc de Lévis, cousin by marriage to Madame de Duras, author of several works of literature] and we will look elsewhere to complete the rest. I have no doubt that we will manage to fill all the shares. Please send me your little trees when I return from Loné towards the end of this month... Dear sister, tomorrow is the Day of the Dead; pray for all the relatives I have lost as I pray for yours. A thousand tendernesses..." Château de Lonné, in the present-day commune of Igé in the Orne département, belonged to Nicolas d'Orglandes, a future peer of France and father-in-law of Chateaubriand's nephew Geoffroy-Louis. Several members of the writer's family had been executed during the French Revolution, including his brother Jean-Baptiste de Chateaubriand, Geoffroy-Louis' father. "MY SISTER" THE DUCHESSE DE DURAS. Daughter of a Conventionnel member guillotined during the Terror, Claire de Kersaint (1777-1819) married the Duc de Duras during emigration, and returned under the Consulate. Under the Restoration, she ran a brilliant literary salon, and wrote several works of fiction herself, including the famous Ourika. She met Chateaubriand in 1808, and soon developed an admiring and loving - albeit platonic - friendship with him. Until around 1824, they saw each other almost every day in Paris, and corresponded regularly when they were apart. The Duchesse de Duras furthered Chateaubriand's career at Court, obtaining for him the Berlin embassy and sending him to the Congress of Verona. In his Mémoires d'outre-tombe, Chateaubriand would paint a concise but laudatory portrait of her, describing her as "such a generous person, of such a noble soul, of a spirit that combined something of the strength of Mme de Staël's thought with the grace of Mme de La Fayette's talent".