The word of the absent The travel letter and the establishment of communities at a distance

Chateaubriand spent about seven months in Italy in 1803 and 1804. He wrote about a hundred letters that allowed him to keep in touch with the communities in which he lived before his departure. For the letter writer, it was a question of maintaining interpersonal links, of continuing to exist on the literary scene and of expressing himself, knowing that these presentations of himself would be subject to variation, depending on the vagaries of the experience, the recipient and the stakes of the exchange.