CHAMFORT, SIIASTIEN Rocit-NicoLAs, 1741-94; one of the most remarkable and among the first of French Bohemians, or brilliant but thriftless authors, or wits. He was the illegitimate son of a strolling actress, and never knew his father. Starting in life with only the name " Nicolas," he found his way to Paris, got into the college des Grassins, worked hard, and won nine prizes out of ten in two years. Much dis gusted with the Latin hexameters that crowned his college reputation, he considered the time wasted which he had spent over them, summarizing his opinion in the contemptu ous epigram, "What I know I do not know; what I do not know I guess." He assumed the name of C., and began writing for the press for bread and renown. Being repelled alike by booksellers and editors, he took to writing sermons at a louis each for lazy or incompetent priests. Having successfully competed for one of the academy prizes, the salons of the upper world were opened to him, and he became fashionable. He went on with alternate success and failure, always poor, and living for the most part upon eleemosynary dinners and suppers, repaying countenance and sustenance with his always brilliant but cynical and sarcastic conversation. He was entertained at Sevres for some years by Mme. Helvetius, and Chabanon gave him his pension of 1200 livres in the ifereare de France. C. also took two more academy prizes, won a hundred livres from Necker, and obtained an enormous reputation. He wrote little and talked much; his reputation increased, and finally, under the protection of the duchesse de Grammont, he went to court, where the prince de Conde made him, his secretary. He was now about 40 years old, and fast growing misanthropic. He resigned his secretaryship and retired into solitude at Auteuil, where lie fell in love and married a lady attached to the household of the duchesse de Maine. She was a clever, amusing woman of the world; but in six months 'she left C. a widower. Then he traveled in Holland, where he lived
awhile with 31. de Narbonne. Then, returning to Paris, he received the chair in the academy left vacant by the death of Sainte Pclaye in 1781. He haunted the court and made himself loved in spite of his withering and uncontrollable irony; but in conse quence of an unfortunate love affair he left the court and was received into the house of 31. de Vaudreuil; about which time lie made the acquaintance of Mirabeau, whom he assisted with orations, and whom he followed heart and soul into the storm and tumult of the revolution. He forgot his old friends; he frequented the clubs, and was for a time secretary of that of the Jacobins; he became a street orator; was among the first of the storming party to enter the Bastile; and worked for a royalist journal in which he depreciated kingships. 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 bad spared the court. This rashness was the cause of his arrest, and he was threatened with a second arrest, whereupon he attempted suicide with pistol and poignard; and, shockingly hacked and shattered, dictated to those who came to arrest him the well-known declaration: "I, Sebastien Roch-Nicolas Chamfort, declare that I would sooner suffer death as a free man than be conducted as a slave to prison." He did not die immediately, but lingered awhile in charge of a gendarme. To the abbe Sieyes he had given fortune in the title of a pamphlet, What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it? Nothing. And to Sieyes also he spoke the famous sar casm: "At last I am about to leave the world, where the heart must be broken or be changed to brass." As a writer, C. left little of value. It was as a conversationist, and especially for his epigrammatic wit and cynicism, that he won a world-wide fame.