This biographical note's inclusion on my website was prompted by the negative response I received via email when I posted a provocative quotation a few days after the Dec. 26, 2004 highly destructive tsunami.

Nicolas de Chamfort

1741 - 1794

 

Quote of the Day   The only thing that stops God from sending another flood is that the first one was useless.                  — Nicolas de Chamfort, bitter French ironist and maker of maxims, 1741-1794     All bleeding hearts, please note that the purpose of these quotes of the day is to provoke thought, not to numb the brain with the dreary, sentimental pieties we hear spewed from every idiot mouth on the street and in the media. Inclusion of this quotation does NOT mean I wish ill to victims of the tsunami, as one emailer has suggested already. I have had the charity addresses up, clickable from the upper right-hand corner of this page, since Dec. 27 and I have contributed to them. I wonder if the two semi-literate Christian bozos who sent those obscene emails have done the same? Bet not! This wee ruckus is just — a tsunami in a teapot. But, as a modest mea culpa, here is American poet Carl Sandberg's poem about the author of this lively aphorism.   CHAMFORT By Carl Sandberg There’s Chamfort. He’s a sample. Locked himself in his library with a gun, Shot off his nose and shot out his right eye. And this Chamfort knew how to write And thousands read his books on how to live, But he himself didn’t know How to die by force of his own hand--see? They found him a red pool on the carpet Cool as an April forenoon, Talking and talking gay maxims and grim epigrams. Well, he wore bandages over his nose and right eye, Drank coffee and chatted many years With men and women who loved him Because he laughed and daily dared Death: “Come and take me.”     Behold the Punishment. Know all men by these presents that William Casselman shall be exposed in the stocks at Pizzlethwaite Common after these assizes, for a duration of not less than thirty hours, pursuant to the conviction summarily given under his seal this day by His Majesty's Most Loyal Servant, The Honourable Judge Nigel Widowes, presiding at Exeter.     original parts of the commentary © 2005 William Gordon Casselman

 

 

 

A French writer, he was born Nicolas-Sébastien Roch 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 obtain such a grant because 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. Madame de Craon called him “Hercule sous la figure d'Adonis.” Although endowed with immense physical strength, Chamfort 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 to Germany in 1761. A younger Nicolas de Chamfort, without his wig 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 éloge on Molière, that his literary reputation was established. An éloge was an essay written by a poor author praising an already rich and famous person, often couched in the most abject tones of servile flattery and done to coax money from the famous person. Or, if the fameux were already defunct, a lickspittle éloge might win plaudits from some French academic whose pet dead author had been the subject of the cringing essay dashed off by the impoverished toady. Down through the centuries, the bales of éloges awarded prizes by the Académie française have generally been esteemed by French posterity as — not worth a sou. Meanwhile Chamfort 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 Sèvres for some years. In 1770 another comedy, Le Marchand de Smyrne ( The Smyrna Merchant ) 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 scribbled off yet another éloge 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 sun king gave Chamfort 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, Chamfort 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 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 then 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 un homme libre plutôt que d'etre reconduit en esclave dans une maison d'arrêt.” "I, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort, declare that I wished to die a free man rather than be enslaved in a house of detention." Chamfort signed his famous death note 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 spoke his supreme sarcasm: “Ah! mon ami, je m'en vais enfin de ce monde, où il faut que le coeur se brise ou se bronze.” "My friend, I'm finally taking leave of this earth, a place where one's heart must either break or be hard as bronze." The writings of Nicolas de 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 violent and iconoclastic spirit of the period of Sturm und Drang that gave them birth as his Réflexions in their exquisite restraint and elaborate subtlety are characteristic of the tranquil elegance of their epoch. Chamfort's writings are rich in colour, in picturesqueness of phrase, in passion, and in audacity. Sainte-Beuve, the great French literary critic of the 19th century, compares them to well-minted coins that retain their value, and to keen arrows that “arrivent brusquement en sifflent encore.” That is, Chamfort's best maxims are like arrows that whistle as they fly and strike home suddenly.     • This entry incorporates public domain text originally from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica and original material written by Bill Casselman.

 

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