CHAMFORT, SEBASTIEN ROCH NICOLAS (1741 ' 794), French wit and man of letters, was born at a little village near Clermont in Auvergne, the son of a grocer named Nicolas. Educated as a free scholar at the College des Grassins, he lived from hand to mouth in Paris 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 Mme. Helvetius entertained him at Sevres for some years. He had a great success with his comedies La _feline Indienne and Le Marchand de Smyrne In while tak ing the waters at Bareges, he met the duchesse de Grammont, sis ter of Choiseul, through whose influence he was introduced at court. In 1776 his poor tragedy et Zeangir, was played at Fontainebleau before Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette; the king gave him a further pension of 1,200 livres, and the prince de Conde made him his secretary. But he was a Bohemian naturally and by habit, and the restraints of the court irked him. In 1781 he was elected to the Academy ; in 1784, through the influence of Calonne, he became secretary to the king's sister, Mme. Elizabeth, and in 1786 he received a pension of 2,000 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 unalter able 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 Mirabeau, with whom he re mained to the last on terms of intimate friendship.
The outbreak of the Revolution made a profound change in Chamfort's life. Theoretically he had long been a republican, and he now devoted all his small fortune to the revolutionary propa ganda. Until Aug. 31, 1791, he was secretary of the Jacobin club; he entered the Bastille among the first of the storming party. He worked for the Mercure de France, collaborated with Ginguene in the Feuille villageoise, and drew up for Talleyrand his Adresse au peuple f rancais.
With the reign of Marat and Robespierre, however, his uncom promising Jacobinism grew critical, and with the fall of the Giron dins his political life came to an end. But he could not restrain the tongue that had made him famous; he no more spared the Con vention than he had spared the court. He was imprisoned for a short time, and released ; but he had determined to prefer death to a repetition of confinement, and when he was again threatened with arrest he attempted suicide with pistol and with poniard, dic tating to those who came to arrest him the well-known declara tion : "Moi, Sebastien-Roch-Nicolas Chamfort, declare avoir voulu mourir en homme libre plutot que d'etre reconduit en es clave dans une maison d'arret," which he signed in a firm hand and in his own blood. He lingered on until April 13, 1794 in charge of a gendarme. To the Abbe Sieyes Chamfort had given fortune in the title of a pamphlet ("Qu'est-ce que le Tiers-Etat? Tout. Qu'a-t-il? Rien"), and to Sieyes did Chamfort retail his supreme sarcasm, the famous "Je rn'en vais en fan de ce monde ou it faut que le coeur se brise ou se bronze." The maker of constitutions fol lowed the dead wit to the grave.
The writings of Chamfort, which include comedies, political articles, literary criticisms, portraits, letters and verses, are col ourless and uninteresting. His genius was in conversation. His Maxirnes et Pensees are, after those of La Rochefoucauld, the most brilliant and suggestive sayings of the 18th century. 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 Re flexions in their ex quisite 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 brusque ment et si fflent encore.
The Oeuvres completes de Nicolas Chamfort appeared at Paris, 5 vols. (1824-25), selections one vol. (1852), with a biographical and critical preface by Arsene Houssaye and Oeuvres choisies, with a preface and notes by M. de Lescure (1879) . See also Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du Lundi; M. Pellisson, Chamfort, etude sur sa vie (1895).