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Additional notes:
  This is not a modern print. This impression is more than 120 years old. The strike is crisp and the lines are sharp.

Extra Information:
  Atala, ou Les Amours de deux sauvages dans le désert ("Atala, or The Loves of two Indian savages in the desert") is an early novella by French author François-René de Chateaubriand, first published on 12 germinal IX (2 April 1801). The story is told from the point of view of the 73-year-old hero, Chactas, whose story is preserved by an oral tradition among the Seminoles. The work, at least partially inspired by his travels in North America, reflects the eighteenth-century French Romanticism and exoticism of its time and went through five editions in its first year. It was adapted frequently for stage, and translated into many languages.

In the prologue, Chateaubriand describes the territorial landscape of former French held North America and presents the backstory of Chactas as a transition into the novel and its frame story, handing off the story's narration to Chactas. At the age of seventeen, the Natchez man Chactas loses his father during a battle against the Muscogees. He flees to St Augustine, Florida, where he is raised in the household of the Spaniard Lopez. After 2½ years, he sets out for home, but is captured by the Muscogees and Seminoles. The chief Simagan sentences him to be burnt alive in their village. The women take pity on him during the weeks of travel, and bring him gifts each night. One woman, Atala (the half-caste Christian daughter of Simagan), tries in vain to help him escape. On arrival at Apalachucla, his bonds are loosened and he is saved from death by her intervention. They run away and roam the wilderness for 27 days before being caught in a huge storm. While they are sheltering, Atala tells Chactas that her father was Lopez, and he realizes that she is the daughter of his adoptive father. Lightning strikes a tree close by, and they run at random before hearing a church bell. Encountering a dog, they are met by its owner, Père Aubry, and he leads them through the storm to his idyllic mission. Aubry's kindness and force of personality impress Chactas greatly. Atala falls in love with Chactas, but cannot marry him, as she has taken a vow of chastity. In despair, she takes poison. Aubry assumes that she is merely ill, but in the presence of Chactas, she reveals what she has done, and Chactas is filled with anger until the missionary tells them that Christianity permits the renunciation of vows. They tend to her, but she dies, and the day after the funeral, Chactas takes Aubry's advice and leaves the mission. In the epilogue, it is revealed that Aubry was later killed by Cherokees, and that, according to Chactas's granddaughter, neither René nor the aged Chactas survived a massacre during an uprising. The full account of Chactas's wanderings after Atala's death, in Les Natchez, gives a somewhat different version of their fates. 

Artist Biography:
  Paul Gustave Louis Christophe Doré was a French artist, printmaker, illustrator and sculptor. Doré worked primarily with wood engraving. Doré was born in Strasbourg on 6 January 1832. By age five, he was a prodigy troublemaker, playing pranks that were mature beyond his years. Seven years later, he began carving in cement. At the age of fifteen Doré began his career working as a caricaturist for the French paper Le Journal pour rire, and subsequently went on to win commissions to depict scenes from books by Rabelais, Balzac, Milton and Dante. Les Oceanides Les Naiades de la mer, 1860s In 1853, Doré was asked to illustrate the works of Lord Byron. This commission was followed by additional work for British publishers, including a new illustrated Bible. In 1856 he produced twelve folio-size illustrations of The Legend of The Wandering Jew, which propagated long standing anti-semitic views of the time, for a short poem which Pierre-Jean de Ranger had derived from a novel of Eugène Sue of 1845. In the 1860s he illustrated a French edition of Cervantes's Don Quixote, and his depictions of the knight and his squire, Sancho Panza, have become so famous that they have influenced subsequent readers, artists, and stage and film directors' ideas of the physical "look" of the two characters. Doré also illustrated an oversized edition of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven", an endeavor that earned him 30,000 francs from publisher Harper & Brothers in 1883. Doré's illustrations for the Bible (1866) were a great success, and in 1867 Doré had a major exhibition of his work in London. This exhibition led to the foundation of the Doré Gallery in Bond Street, London. In 1869, Blanchard Jerrold, the son of Douglas William Jerrold, suggested that they work together to produce a comprehensive portrait of London. Jerrold had obtained the idea from The Microcosm of London produced by Rudolph Ackermann, William Pyne, and Thomas Rowlandson in 1808. Doré signed a five-year contract with the publishers Grant & Co that involved his staying in London for three months a year, and he received the vast sum of £10,000 a year for the project. Doré was mainly celebrated for his paintings in his day. His paintings remain world-renowned, but his woodcuts and engravings, like those he did for Jerrold, are where he really excelled as an artist with an individual vision. The completed book, London: A Pilgrimage, with 180 engravings, was published in 1872. It enjoyed commercial and popular success, but the work was disliked by many contemporary critics. Some of these critics were concerned with the fact that Doré appeared to focus on the poverty that existed in parts of London. Doré was accused by The Art Journal of "inventing rather than copying." The Westminster Review claimed that "Doré gives us sketches in which the commonest, the vulgarest external features are set down." The book was a financial success, however, and Doré received commissions from other British publishers. Doré's later work included illustrations for new editions of Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Milton's Paradise Lost, Tennyson's Idylls of the King, The Works of Thomas Hood, and The Divine Comedy. Doré's work also appeared in the weekly newspaper The Illustrated London News. Doré never married and, following the death of his father in 1849, he continued to live with his mother, illustrating books until his death in Paris following a short illness. The city's Père Lachaise Cemetery contains his grave. The government of France made him a Chevalier de la Legion d'honneur in 1861.

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