The article considers the theme of the ship in Chateaubriand’s "Les Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe". It includes three thematic sections: the first focuses on the poet’s great sea-voyages, the second and third foreground the many symbolic implications suggested by the 'navire'. Like a foreign country endowed with a language of its own, the ship is the object in which the intellectual and artist identifies himself, as the symbol of his existential vagrancy.
