El entierro de Atala

By 1808 France was gripped by a slim novel that had appeared seven years earlier. Chateaubriand's Atala told of a Christian girl in the American wilderness who falls in love with a young native man, Chactas, but is bound by a vow of chastity, and who poisons herself rather than break it. The book was a sensation, and Girodet chose its saddest moment for this painting, shown at the Salon of 1808. Atala lies wrapped in a white shroud in a shadowy grotto, a crucifix in her hands, while Chactas clutches her legs in grief and an old priest steadies her body above the grave. Girodet gives the dead girl the smooth polish of a classical statue while charging the scene with the raw feeling readers had wept over in the book.