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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: CAU-CHA |
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CHAMFORT, SEBASTIEN ROCH NICOLAS (1741-1794) , French man of letters, was born at a little village
For some time he contrived to exist by teaching and as a booksellers' hack. His good looks and ready wit, however, soon brought him into notice; but though endowed with immense strength" Hercule sous la figure d'Adonis," Madame de Craon called himhe 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 comedy, La Jeune Indienne (1764), which was performed with some success, and this was followed by a series of " epistles " in verse, essays and odes. It was not, however, until 1769, when he won the prize of the French Academy for his Eloge on Moliere, that his literary reputation was established.Meanwhile he had lived from hand to mouth, mainly on the hospitality of people who were only too glad to give him board and lodging in exchange for the pleasure of the conversation for which he was famous. Thus Madame Helvetius entertained him at Sevres for some years. In 1770 another comedy, Le Marchand de S'myrne, brought him still further into notice, and he seemed on the road to fortune, when he was suddenly smitten with a horrible disease. His distress was relieved by the generosity of a friend, who 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 Contrexeville
Conde made hint his secretary. But he was a Bohemian naturally and by habit, the restraints of the court irked him, and with increasing years he was growing misanthropical. After a year he resigned his post in the prince's household and retired into solitude at Auteuil. There, comparing the authors of old with the men of his own time, he uttered the famous mot that proclaims the superiority of the dead over the living as companions; and there too he presently 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, wherein six months 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 Diction-?wire des antiquites frangaises. 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
whom he assisted with money and influence, and one at least of whose speechesthat on the Academieshe wrote. The outbreak of the,Revolution made a profound change in the relations of Chamfort's life. Theoretically he had long been a republican, and he now threw himself into the new movement
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 Bibliotheque Nationale, to a share in the direction of which he had been appointed by 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 with pistol and with 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 plutot que d'etre reconduit en esclave daps une maison d'arret "which he signed in a firm hand and in his own blood. He did not die at once, but lingered on until the 13th of April 1794 in charge of a gendarme, for whose wardship he paid a crown a day. To the Abbe Sieyes Chamfort had given fortune in the title of a pamphlet (" Qu'est-ce que le Tiers-Flat? Tout. Qu'a-t-il? Rien "), and to Sieyes did Chamfort retail his supreme sarcasm, the famous " Je m'en vais enfin de ce monde ()Ail faut que le c zur se brise ou se bronze." The maker of constitutions followed the dead wit to the grave.The writings of Chamfort, which include comedies, political articles, literary criticisms, portraits, letters, and verses, are colourless and uninteresting in the extreme. As a talker, how-ever, he was of extraordinary force. His Maximes et Pensees, 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
An edition of his worksCEuvres completes de Nicolas Chamfortwas published at Paris in five volumes in 1824-1825. SelectionsEEuvres de Chamfortin one volume, appeared in 1852, with a biographical and critical preface by Arsene Houssaye, reprinted from the Revue des deux mondes; and CEuvres choisies (2 vols.), with a preface and notes by M. de Lescure (1879). See also Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du Lundi.End of Article: CHAMFORT, SEBASTIEN ROCH NICOLAS (1741-1794) If you wish, you can link directly to this article.
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