"The twelfth, which I now publish, has been revised with the greatest care. I have consulted the friends prompt to censure me; I have weighed each phrase, examined every word. The style, freed from certain epithets which embarrassed it, proceeds perhaps more naturally and with greater simplicity. I have introduced more order and logic into certain ideas, and I have effaced even the slightest inaccuracies of language. M. de la Harpe observed to me, on the subject of 'Atala,' 'If you will shut yourself up with me only for a few hours, that time will suffice for wiping out the spots that cause your critics to cry out so loudly.' I have passed four years in the revision of this episode; but it is now as I intend it to remain. It is at present the only 'Atala' I shall ever in future acknowledge."
"The new nature and the new manners I have described have also drawn upon me another ill-considered reproach. I have been taken for the inventor of certain extraordinary details, whereas I merely repeated circumstances well known to all travellers. Some notes added to the present edition of 'Atala' would easily have justified this assertion; but if I had introduced them at every point where each reader might have looked for them, they would soon have exceeded the length of the work itself. I therefore gave up the idea of annotations."
France formerly possessed in North America a vast empire, extending from Labrador to the Floridas, and from the shores of the Atlantic to the most distant lakes of Upper Canada.
Four great rivers, deriving their sources from the same mountains, divided these immense regions: the river St. Lawrence, which is lost to the east in the gulf of that name; the Western River, whose waters flow on to seas unknown; the river Bourbon, which runs from south to north into Hudson's Bay; and the Mississippi, whose waters fall from north to south into the Gulf of Mexico.
The last-named river, in its course of more than a thousand leagues, waters a delicious country, called by the inhabitants of the United States the New Eden, to which the French left the pretty appellation of Louisiana. A thousand other rivers, tributaries of the Mississippi--the Missouri, the Illinois, the Arkansas, the Wabache, the Tennessee--enrich it with their mud and fertilize it with their waters. When all these rivers have been swollen by the deluges of winter, uprooted trees, forming large portions of forests torn down by tempests, crowd about their sources. In a short time the mud cements the torn trees together, and they become enchained by creepers, which, taking root in every direction, bind and consolidate the débris. Carried away by the foaming waves, the rafts descend to the Mississippi, which, taking possession of them, hurries them down towards the Gulf of Mexico, throws them upon sandbanks, and so increases the number of its mouths. At intervals the swollen river raises its voice whilst passing over the resisting heaps, and spreads its overflowing waters around the colonnades of the forests, and the pyramids of the Indian tombs: and so the Mississippi is the Nile of these deserts. But grace is always united to splendor in the scenes of Nature: while the mid-stream bears away towards the sea the dead trunks of pine-trees and oaks, the lateral currents on either side convey along the shores floating islands of pistias and nenuphars, whose yellow roses stand out like little pavilions. Green serpents, blue herons, pink flamingoes, and baby crocodiles embark as passengers on these rafts of flowers; and the brilliant colony, unfolding to the wind its golden sails, glides along slumberingly till it arrives at some retired creek in the river.