......................................................... .STENIO SOLINAS
...
Only an exalted could think he could choice a wind and sea-gulls roaring sea girt rock as a grave for himself. Nobody but a genius could succeed in transforming this exaltation in reality and turn himself, his own life and his works into a stone monument, so bare but streaming such calls to make inscriptions, phrases, at least a line.... only vain.  
On the Bè rock, facing the old town of Saint Malo, the exalted genius of Chateaubriand is going on keeping his struggle against the oblivion. Since he decides to make people know his live but only since the date when he will die, and since the Mèmoires that contain his life are entitled d'outretombe, it turns rather clear the challenge of eternity; it have never been any author so belonging to his time, yet so inadequate, so irreparably in advance and nevertheless always terribly late, revolutionary styled but conservative in morals, reactionary tempered but progressive attitude holder, politics impassioned but unable to service anywhat but he himself... Witness of the end of a world, of an epochal change that is no less than the beginning of modernity, Chateaubriand goes through the Ancien Regime, the Revolution, the Restoration, pursuing a personal loyalty and the loyalty toward a character which might avoid occurrences and might not be caught by compromises.  
Very sensible indicator of the moods and passions surrounding him, he tries to perform them and give them a meaning beyond the moment, arryments and alliances.   
Megalomaniac in times of giants, he does not give up mediocrity, either public or private, which is taking their place, he believes only in individual and collective greatness. Still today, 150 years since his death, his' is an unusual and present lesson for whom wants to seal at sight, having not anymore an ideological reference, among the wreckage of the old that is disappearing and the outlines of the new that finds hard to come out, between what we used to be and what we are going to be, saving what it can be saved, daring sometimes what is undareable.  
During transitions, who does not adequate is seemingly who is defeated; but, as Chateaubriand teaches, “the proud of victory is unbearable for me “. In the castle of Combourg where he lives a troubled youth, the future writer and traveller, the ambassador and the controversialist, the politic and the seducer take shape and weight. “Men don't have only one and exactly alike life. 

They have many lined up lives and that is just their misery.  
Those walls, internals, towers can give us still today the idea of his loneliness, among a bigoted mother, an icy manner father, a mournful sister, the load of a Spartanly cruel instruction ('Mister the chevalier, is he perhaps afraid? was said to him smiling ironically when he was going to bed, in the most insulated little tower, in a darkness never lighted up, along more and more dark nights...) inside which ceremonials were severe, manifestations of affection put aside, and conversation non-existent.
It is on this circumstances that the mind runs hell for leather through fancied worlds and forged beings, that sweeps into a morbid sensitiveness, standing by which everything hurts you, everything hits you, all is felt as if the only butt of unhappiness were you... Proud, wild, intolerant to obedience, to the noblesse he belongs to, Chateaubriand get on time to acquire the its behavioring style but he does not get the proper vices of decadency.  

  
When the revolution breaks out he is twenty, and he has already understood that  “aristocracy goes through three different ages: the superiority age, the privileges one, the vanity one. Got out from the first one, it degenerates into the second to die out then on the third phase.”  
He has sworn loyalty to the king and so it will be, but he understands too well that absolutism is over and that the noblesse has at last killed itself; turned to mere formality, his substance has gone searching other coats. About the Vandean epos and how the èmigrès let it die out, about the ingenuous trust of those fighters in the honour of a coward and knavish crown, about the noblesse waiting a leading, waiting for someone who leads the struggle, Chateaubriand says a fulminating phrase: “Giants went to ask pygmies for a leader.” The epoch of travels precedes the exile and travels alternate rises and falls of the politic epoch.  
That's the way, among others, to cultivate his own loneliness, the taste of independence, the way not to give account to anybody and to his times.  
Further, travelling allows him to fly away from what he does not like. All Chateaubriand' s life is a run into deception, a struggle for a missed cause, an opposition to just won causes.  
A run where he feels “as a Huguelin, Time bowing over him gnawing at his cranium”, a run where he does not belong anymore “to those mornings that solace by themselves but to those nightfall hours that need solace “. A run against time by an ahead being: “Why have I been realist against my instinct in times when a miserable court race could neither hear me nor understand me? Why have I been thrown into this troupe of mediocres among whom I am deemed as a hare-brained when I spoke of courage; as a revolutionary when I spoke of freedom?” Nevertheless he understands his times very well: he understand that at the beginning of the new century it has been turned the page, and that no restoration is possible, any absolutism is no more proposable, that no revolutionary republic is any more desirable.   
Even if Napoleon seems to stop, along a period of fifteen years, the match of the old regime, that does not resign itself to disappear and the new world that persists in reappearing, then it will not be possible anymore to turn back; but going on means a whole of forces, ideals, wills, hopes, greatness that his compatriots lack. Chateaubriand is haunted by greatness, he is among those who have would 'die with Leonidas and live with Pericles”.  
The post-Napoleon phase, after struggling him (“Vainly Nerone flourishes, Tacitus was already born in the Empire “ he will write a memorable article the day after of the murder of the Duke of Enghien), not as emperor but as a dictator, seems to him miserable.  
And he is right. It is little alike the Longanesi', Malaparte', Soffici' feelings after the fall of fascism and Mussolini. Normality as mediocrity. Between Saint Malo and Combourg, in Bretagne, where on this anniversary, exhibitions, meetings, publications and commemorations are being performed, it is consumed an unrepeatable experience, it comes to light an out of common life.  
The thousand pages of the Mèmoires d'outretombe (just translated and edited by Einaudi), ever read by anybody during his life, are the most uncommon funeral monument to literature, the highest tribute paid to writing, to its rôle, its meaning.                 
 
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