La Vie de Rancé Reading Order

La Vie de Rancé (The Life of Rancé, 1844) by François-René de Chateaubriand is his last prose work and, in the view of several important critics (including Roland Barthes, who wrote a book about it), his strangest and most beautiful — a short biography of the Abbé de Rancé, the seventeenth-century reformer of the monastery of La Trappe who had been a worldly abbé and man of gallantry before he was transformed by the death of his mistress (the widow of the Duc de Montbazon) into the most rigorous monastic reformer in French history. Chateaubriand undertook the biography at the request of his confessor, as a kind of penitential work, when he was an old man in his seventies, and the result is extraordinary: rather than a scholarly biography, the book is a series of brilliant digressions in which Rancé's story serves as an occasion for Chateaubriand to meditate on death, old age, the passage of time, solitude, and the world he has outlived. Barthes read La Vie de Rancé as a meditation on the relationship between writing and death, and the most important work in Chateaubriand's canon for understanding his final understanding of what prose can do.