Nicolas Chamfort - Biography

Biography

Chamfort was born Sébastien-Roch Nicolas, Clermont-Ferrand, Puy-de-Dôme on April 6, 1741, according to a baptismal certificate from Saint-Genès parish in Clermont-Ferrand, to a grocer named Nicolas. On June 22, a second birth certificate gives him the name « Sébastien Roch » from «unknown parents ». A journey to Paris resulted in the boy's obtaining a bursary at the Collège des Grassins (fr) (a secondary school). He worked hard, although one of his most contemptuous epigrams reads: 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"). When the principal of the College promised Chamfort a benefice, he replied that he could not accept 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 subsisted by teaching and hack writing. His good looks and ready wit brought him attention; but, though endowed with immense physical strength—Madame de Craon called him "Hercule sous la figure d'Adonis"--he lived so hard that he was glad to have the opportunity to do a cure at Spa when the Belgian minister in Paris, M. van Eyck, invited Chamfort to accompany him to Germany in 1761. On his return to Paris, Chamfort produced a successful comedy, La Jeune Indienne (1764), following it with a series of epistles in verse, essays and odes. However, his literary reputation was not established until 1769, when the Académie française awarded him a prize for his Eloge on Molière.

Until then, he 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, brought him further notice, and he seemed on the road to fame and fortune, when illness struck. A generous friend gave him a pension of 1200 livres, charged on the Mercure de France. Thus assisted, he was able to go to the baths of Contrexéville 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 in 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 tragedy, Mustapha et Zeangir, was played at Fontainebleau before Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Subsequently, the king gave him a further pension of 1200 livres and his cousin, the Prince de Condé, made him his secretary. Disliking the constraints of court life, he became increasingly discontented, and 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 48 years old, but also clever, amusing, and a woman of the world. Chamfort married her. They soon moved to Vaucouleurs, where she died within six months. Chamfort lived in Holland for a time with M. de Narbonne, then returned to Paris where he was elected in 1781 to the Academy Francaise.

He was a member of the Masonic lodge Les Neuf Sœurs.

In 1784, through the influence of Calonne, he became secretary to the king's sister, Madame Élisabeth, 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 despite his unalterable irony. He quit the court for good after an unfortunate and mysterious love affair, and was taken into the house of M. de Vaudreuil. Here, in 1783, he met Honoré Mirabeau, with whom he remained steadfast friends, whom he assisted with money and influence, and at least one of whose speeches he wrote.

The outbreak of the French Revolution profoundly changed Chamfort's life. Theoretically a republican, he threw himself into the new movement with almost fanatical ardour, forgetting his old friends at court and devoting his entire small fortune to revolutionary propaganda. He became a street orator and was among the first to enter the Bastille when it was stormed. Until 3 August 1791 he was secretary of the Jacobin club. He worked for the Mercure de France, collaborated with Pierre-Louis Ginguené in the Feuille villageoise, and drew up for Talleyrand his Addresse au peuple français.

With the reign of Marat and Robespierre, however, he became critical of uncompromising Jacobinism, 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. Fingered 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 prison des Madelonnettes. Soon after his release, he was threatened again with arrest, but he decided that death was preferable to a repetition of the moral and physical restraint to which he had been subjected.