Book excerpt: This work of academic scholarship, told in first person as an investigative mystery, explores Chateaubriand's secret sponsorship of the author's great-great-grandfather, Thomas Fallon, to a four-year elite education at a prestigious French Royal Academy. Chateaubriand, considered the founder of French romantic literature, likely believed he was the boy's father. The boy's mother, Mary Neale Fallon, an Irish woman who surely rescued Chateaubriand in his hour of need while in exile in London, thereby made possible the launch of his writing career. In the course of uncovering aspects of Chateaubriand's hidden life, as disguised in his memoirs and elsewhere, this genealogical investigation, rendered largely as a memoir, explores aspects of 19th century love and romance; intergenerational family oral history; and the value of inheriting, through one means or another, an enduring legacy of love.--Publisher.