Nicolas Chamfort
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Nicolas Chamfort (1741 - April 13, 1794), was a French writer. He was born Nicolas-Sébastien Roch.
He was born near Clermont in Auvergne, and, according to a baptismal certificate found among his papers, was the son of a grocer named Nicolas. A journey to Paris resulted in the boy's obtaining a bursary at the Collège des Grassins. He worked hard, although he wrote later in one of his most contemptuous epigrams: Ce que j'ai appris je ne le sais plus; le peu que je sais encore, je l'ai deviné ("What I learned I no longer know; the little I still know, I guessed"). After college, Chamfort told the principal of his college, who promised him a benefice, that he would never be one because as he preferred honour to honours, j'aime l'honneur et non les honneurs. About this time he assumed the name of Chamfort.
For some time he existed by teaching and as a bookseller's hack. His good looks and ready wit brought him attention; but, though endowed with immense physical strength, "Hercule sous la figure d'Adonis", Madame de Craon called him he lived so hard that he was glad of the chance of doing a cure at Spa when the Belgian minister in Paris, M. van Eyck, took him with him to Germany in 1761. On his return to Paris he produced a successful comedy, La Jeune Indienne (1764), and followed it with a series of epistles in verse, essays and odes. It was not, however, until 1769, when he won the prize of the Académie française for his Eloge on Molière, that his literary reputation was established.
Meanwhile he had lived from hand to mouth, mainly on the hospitality of people who gave him board and lodging in exchange for the pleasure of the conversation for which he was famous. Madame Helvétius entertained him at Sévres for some years. In 1770 another comedy, Le Marchand de Smyrne, brought him still further into notice, and he seemed on the road to fortune, when he was suddenly struck down by illness. A generous friend made over to him a pension of 1200 livres charged on the Mercure de France. With this assistance he was able to go to the baths of Contrexville and to spend some time in the country, where he wrote an Eloge on La Fontaine which won the prize of the Academy of Marseilles (1774).
In 1775, while taking the waters at Barges, he met the duchesse de Grammont, sister of Choiseul, through whose influence he was introduced at court. In 1776 his poor tragedy, Mustapha et Zeangir, was played at Fontainebleau before Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette; the king gave him a further pension of 1200 livres and Louis Joseph of Bourbon, the Prince de Condé, made him his secretary. Disliking the restraints of the court, he became increasingly discontented. After a year he resigned his post in the prince's household and retired to Auteuil. There, comparing the authors of old with his contemporaries, he uttered the famous mot that proclaims the superiority of the dead over the living as companions; and there too he fell in love. The lady, attached to the household of the duchesse du Maine, was forty-eight years old, but clever, amusing, a woman of the world; and Chamfort married her. They left Auteuil, and went to Vaucouleurs, where six months later Madame Chamfort died. Chamfort lived in Holland for a time with M. de Narbonne, and returning to Paris received in 1781 the place at the Academy left vacant by the death of La Curne de Sainte-Palaye, the author of the Dictionnaire des antiquités françaises.
In 1784, through the influence of Calonne, he became secretary to the king's sister, Madame Elizabeth, and in 1786 he received a pension of 2000 livres from the royal treasury. He was thus once more attached to the court, and made himself friends in spite of the reach and tendency of his unalterable irony; but he quitted it for ever after an unfortunate and mysterious love affair, and was received into the house of M. de Vaudreuil. Here in 1783 he had met Honoré Mirabeau, with whom he remained very friendly, whom he assisted with money and influence, and at least one of whose speeches he wrote.
The outbreak of the French Revolution made a profound change in Chamfort's life. Theoretically a republican, he threw himself into the new movement with almost fanatical ardour, devoting all his small fortune to the revolutionary propaganda and forgetting his old friends at court. Until August 3 1791 he was secretary of the Jacobin club; he became a street orator and entered the Bastille among the first of the storming party. He worked for the Mercure de France, collaborated with Pierre-Louis Ginguené in the Feuille villageoise, and drew up for Talleyrand his Adresse au peuple français.
With the reign of Marat and Robespierre, however, his uncompromising Jacobinism grew critical, and with the fall of the Girondins his political life came to an end. But he could not restrain the tongue that had made him famous; he no more spared the Convention than he had spared the court. His notorious republicanism failed to excuse the sarcasms he lavished on the new order of things, and denounced by an assistant in the Bibliothèque Nationale, to a share in the direction of which he had been appointed by Jean Marie Roland, he was taken to the Madelonnettes. Released for a moment, he was threatened again with arrest; but he had determined to prefer death to a repetition of the moral and physical restraint to which he had been subjected.
He attempted suicide in September 1793 with pistol and poniard; and, horribly hacked and shattered, dictated to those who came to arrest him the well-known declaration Moi, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort, declare avoir voulu mourir en homme libre plutôt que d'etre reconduit en esclave dans une maison darrft which he signed in a firm hand and in his own blood. He did not die at once, but lingered on until April 13, 1794, in the charge of a gendarme, to whom he paid a crown a day. To the Abbé Sieyès Chamfort had given fortune in the title of a pamphlet (Quest-ce que le Tiers-Etat? Tout. Qua-t-il? Rien), and to Sieyès did Chamfort retail his supreme sarcasm, the famous Ah! mon ami, je m'en vais enfin de ce monde, où il faut que le coeur se brise ou se bronze. The maker of constitutions followed the dead wit to the grave.
The writings of Chamfort include comedies, political articles, literary criticisms, portraits, letters, and verses. His Maximes et Pensées, highly praised by John Stuart Mill, are, after those of La Rochefoucauld, the most brilliant and suggestive sayings that have been given to the modern world. The aphorisms of Chamfort, less systematic and psychologically less important than those of La Rochefoucauld, are as significant in their violence and iconoclastic spirit of the period of storm and preparation that gave them birth as the Réflexions in their exquisite restraint and elaborate subtlety are characteristic of the tranquil elegance of their epoch; and they have the advantage in richness of colour, in picturesqueness of phrase, in passion, in audacity. Sainte-Beuve compares them to well-minted coins that retain their value, and to keen arrows that arrivent brusquement el sifflent encore.
Reference
- This entry incorporates public domain text originally from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Links
- Quotes by Chamfort (http://quote.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamfort) (WikiQuote)
| Preceded by: Jean-Baptiste de Lacurne de Sainte-Palaye | Seat 6 Académie française | Succeeded by: Pierre-Louis Roederer |