Abstract
As Bachelard reminded us, the written word has a particular power that oral communication does not have : it enables us to fix states. This is particularly true for children, who form and crystallize around what they read. If the number of literary accounts of children's reading exploded with the advent of Romanticism, it's because the status of literature changed : Romanticism made literature the companion of the intimate. It became the very language of the psyche and of the most secret self. Henceforth, a child's reading traces the very map of childhood, the path taken by the young being. Children grow up with books, through books.
Chateaubriand shows himself to be very sensitive to this evolution of the child parallel to that of reading. It is reading that accompanies, or even triggers, the child's discovery of sexuality, and this childhood reading determines his future work. No doubt the young Chateaubriand's readings would not have had the same effect on him if they had not been in Latin, the language of lapidary inscription, of the written word par excellence, that which is engraved in marble and which is also engraved in the life of the young being. The dead language is a powerful one : it confers on the child a temporal depth that he or she would otherwise have no physical sensation of. Chateaubriand also shows that bad reading is writing : reading is sometimes bad reading, and bad reading is, in a way, writing. Even if books don't always act in the way teachers want them to, this clandestine action of books, parallel to official teaching, is nonetheless part of the more global system of education through reading.
