True to the intellectual tendency of which he had been the first distinguished exponent, he did not choose modern or active heroes, in fact did not choose heroes at all, but martyrs as his theme. They also give the name to his work, _Les Martyrs ou le Triomphe de la Religion Chrétienne_, which, written as it is in prose, produces more the effect of an ordinary two-volume novel than of an epic. To understand this choice of subject we must remember that the point of view of the men of this school was not really that of the Empire at all, but that of the returned _émigrés_. They had not yet recovered from the horror excited in them by the deeds of the Revolution. In the leaders of the Revolution they saw only men of blood, in the vanquished party only hapless victims. In their eyes the real hero was not the conqueror, not the adventurous soldier, but Louis XVI., the innocent sufferer. What were they if not martyrs, all those Christian priests who in the Days of September were murdered for the sake of their religion, all those men and women who died in La Vendée for their loyalty to the King by the grace of God! Victims as innocent as the Princesse de Lamballe, or the maidens of Verdun, or the lately executed Duke of Enghien, were heroines and heroes a thousand times more worthy to be sung than the men who were defiling themselves with blood on all the battle-fields of Europe.
In 1802 Chateaubriand conceived the idea of his epic; in 1806 the first cantos were ready for publication. But the events of the epic were to happen in all parts of the world known to the Romans. Chateaubriand was not indolent by nature; it was not his aim to finish the work as quickly as possible in order to rest upon his laurels. He stopped short, and in July 1806 went off to travel in Greece, Syria, Egypt, and Carthaginian Africa, returning through Spain. The one object of this tour was, he himself gives us to understand in the prefaces to _Les Martyrs_ and the _Notes of Travel (Itinéraire)_, the perfecting of his work. In the one preface we read: "This journey was undertaken for the sole purpose of seeing and painting those districts in which I intended to lay the scenes of _Les Martyrs_"; in the other: "I did not undertake this journey in order to describe it. I had a purpose, and that purpose I have accomplished in _Les Martyrs_; I went in quest of pictures--that was all."