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Chamfort, Sébastien Roch Nicolas (1741-1794) | |
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French writer and conversationalist, whose maxims became popular bywords during the French Revolution. Nicolas de Chamfort coined the early motto of the revolution, "War to the châteaux, peace to the cottages" (Guerre aux châteaux, paix aux chaumières). His aphorisms, which continued the moralist tradition of La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère, have inspired such writers as Goethe, Pushkin, Stendhal, Nietzsche, and Emile Cioran. Also Schopenhauer frequently referred to Chamfort and Albert Camus wrote a preface to Chamfort's Maximes et pensées. It is nature's will that wise men have their illusions as well as fools, to the end that they be not made too unhappy by their own wisdom. Nicolas de Chamfort was born Sébastien Roch Nicolas near Clermont, Auvergne. He was the illegitimate son of Pierre Nicolas, a canon at Clermont Cathedral, and Jacqueline de Vinzelles, who belonged to a noble family. Chamfort was raised by a grocer wife, named Thérèse Nicolas, a devoted mother to her foster child. At the age of seven or eight, Chamfort learned the name of his real mother. At school, Chamfort was a brilliant student. He was sent in 1750 to Paris, where he was educated at the Collège des Grassins, one of the best schools in France. "I'll never be a priest," Chamfort declared. "I'm too fond of sleep, philosophy, women, honor and real fame; and not fond enough of quarrels, hypocrisy, honors and money." (quoted in Bloodlust: On the Roots of Violence from Cain and Abel to the Present by Russell Jacoby, New York: Free Press, 2011, p. 71) After college, Chamfort earned his living as a tutor and journalist. At twenty-one, Sébastien Roch Nicolas assumed the name of "de Chamfort." With the help of the patronage system and pensions he received, he was able to maintain a certain intellectual lifestyle, without being forced to earn his living entirely from writing. As member of the socially rootless intelligentsia, Chamfort felt a sense of solidarity with the lower ranks of society and once stated: "The poor are the Negroes of Europe" (Les pauvres sont les nègres de l'Europe). In the 18th century, the "white Negro" could refer to degraded whites, the Irish in English eyes, but later Dostoevsky described the London poor as "white Negroes." "Vous ne le croyez qu'un Adonis, et c'est un Hercule," said one of the women with whom Chamfort had an affair. (Chamfort: Biographie, suivie de soixante-dix maximes, anecdotes, mots et dialogues inédits, ou jamais réédités by Claude Arnaud, Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, 1988, p. 50) Chamfort established first his reputation as a playwright, starting with the comedy La Jeune Indienne (The Young Indian), produced in 1764. Already in his youth, Chamfort had revealed his interest in America, he even planned to leave for the New World. In the story, which portrayed Indians, merchants and Quakers, a young officer is saved from cannibals by a native girl and becomes her lover. Chamfort sent a copy of La Jeune Indienne to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom he greatly admired. Le
Marchand de Smyrne
(1770, The Merchant of Smyrna), another success, tells of captured
Frenchmen who are put up for sale in Smyrna, an important slave market
at that time. The title probably refers to Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice
– besides being set in the Mediterranean world, both plays are
concerned with cross-cultural encounter. The
main goods of Chamfort's Turkish villain, Kaled, are slaves. He
cleverly defends himself by saying to one of the western captives: the
French also sell slaves, is it not all the same? The only
difference is that they are black, but you are white.
During the revolutionary upheavals in France, arrested for the crime of
being an aristocrat, Chamfort offered this play as an evidence of his
egalitarian convictions. (Aristocracy and its Enemies in the Age of Revolution by William Doyle, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 82) In 1769 Chamfort won a prize in eloquence from the French
Academy for his Eloge de Molière (1766). "Happy times
when Louis reigned with Pompadour!" Chamfort wrote of the golden age of
his life. After contracting a mysterious disease, that destroyed his
good looks and virility, he left Paris for some time. In the mid-1770s,
Chamfort was introduced at the court of Louis XVI and his verse tragedy Mustapha
et Zéangir, about the sons of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, was performed at Fontainebleau "in front of Their
Majesties" in 1776 and 1777. Chamfort dedicated the tragedy to Marie Antoinette on her permission.
Much to his disappoitment, the play received hostile reviews
in Paris. As Mme Campan recorded in her memoirs: "The spirit of
opposition which prevailed in that city, delighted in reversing the
verdicts of the Court. The Queen determined never again to give any
marked countenance to new dramatic works. She reserved her patronage
for musical composers, and in a few years their art arrived at a
perfection it had never before attained in France." (Memoirs of Madame Campan on Marie Antoinette and Her Court,
with an introduction by G. K. Fortescue, and with a preface by Mme.
Campan, a prefatory memoir of Madame Campan by F. Barriere and notes of
conversations with Madame Campan by M. Maigne. Editor-in-chief G. K.
Fostercue, Vol. 1, Boston: J. B. Millet Company, 1909, p. 215) Most of his life, Chamfort adhered to his cynical definition of love as "nothing but the contact of two epidermises." Nevertheless, while in Auteuil he fell in love with Marthe Buffon, who was several years older. Later Chamfort said that between them there was something better than love, a complete union of the level of ideas, feelings and attitudes. ('Nicolas Chamfort (1741-1794),' in Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love by Andrew Shaffer, New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 2011, pp. 48-53) Buffon had been brought up at the court of the duchesse du Maine; she was a self-confident lady, and quick at repartee. Chamfort married her in 1782 and moved to Vaucouleurs. The brief period of happiness ended six months later when she suddenly died. After spending some time in Holland, he returned to Paris, where he had an affair with Julie Careau, a dancer and witty conversationalist, who held a salon on rue Chantereine. In 1781 Chamfort was elected to the French Academy. During the revolution he attacked academies in his Discours sur les Académies (1791). With the Count de Mirabeau, whom he had met in 1783, he collaborated on the newspaper Mercure de France. In 1784 Chamfort became the secretary to Madame Elizabeth, Louis XVI's sister. Two years later he received a pension of 2,000 livres from the royal treasury, thus becoming one of the best pensioned writers in his country. He also accepted the honoray post of interpreter-secretary to the Swiss and Grison Regiment. Some of his friends thought that he had sold himself. Not only disillusioned with the the high society, but also captured by the mania for self-observation, Chamfort started to collect anecdotes, epigrams, and aphorism of human passions and actions. He decided that he would not publish his Maximes et anecdotes. By the time of his death, Chamfort's work consisted of 1.266 fragments, deposited into boxes. At
the beginning of the French Revolution, Chamfort had been a
member of the radical Jacobin Club. He hoped that the Revolution would
travel round the world,
but he did not advocate war. A number of his friends were moderate republicans. In May 1792 Chamfort took the editorship of La Gazette de France. Uable to manage the paper succesfully he resigned after only six weeks. Chamfort was appointed in August 1792 co-director
of the
Bibliothèque Nationale with Jean-Louis Carra, a member of the
Convention. Although Chamfort first accepted the post with reluctance,
he – an avid reader by nature –
eventually became a guardian of books and other items housed in the
library. Taking seriously his responsibilities, Comfort managed to save
the collections from destruction, as well as seventeen thousand gold
objects from Saint Genevieve Church with the help of Abbé Barthélemy. (From Royal to National: The Louvre Museum and the Bibliothèque Nationale by Bette Wyn Oliver, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007, p. 27) Shocked by the excess of the Reign of Terror, Chamfort came
into conflict with Marat, the editor of L'Ami du Peuple, and
Robespierre, one of the leading figures of the revolution. "Be my
brother, or I kill you" (Sois mon frère ou je te tue), was his version
of the revolutionary watchword, "Fraternity or Death," painted on all
walls. On hearing that Charlotte Corday had assassinated Marat, he
exclaimned, "King Marat is dead!" ('Safeguarding the Nation's Past: Chamfort's Brief Career at the Bibliothèque Nationale' by Bette W. Oliver, Libraries & Culture, Vol. 34, No. 4, Fall, 1999, pp. 373-379) In 1793 Chamfort and some other librarians were denounced by another library employee as "sly aristocrats" and "false patriots." Chamfort was arrested and taken with most of his employees to the Madelonettes prison, once a convent but at that time known for its unhygienic conditions, vermin, and poor food, and then released. The forty-eight hour prison stint was enough for Chamfort and he resigned from his post. His former co-director Carra was executed. When Chamfort was again threatened with imprisonment in November 1793, he attempted suicide. He first shot himself in the head and blew out his right eye. Astonished at being alive, he then he tried to cut his throat, but the blade slipped and he had to try again. With a second razor, he slashed his chest, thights, and calves. To the doctor, who had been called to the scene, Chamfort told that he had done what he had done, because of "having horror most of all of going to rot in prison . . . and satisfying nature's calls in the presence of, and in common with, thirty people." (Chamfort: A Biography by Claude Arnaud, translated by Deke Dusinberre, with a foreword by Joseph Epstein, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992, p. 249) In January 1794 Chamfort was given complete freedom by the Committee of Public Safety. The bullet which had shattered his nasal wall remained in his head. After the festering ceased, Chamfort started to translate Greek epigrams and write poetry. Mentally he felt livelier than ever but did not care for any luxuries. After selling his bed, bathtub, and two hundred and thirty bound volumes, he had only five pieces of furniture, a few engravings, and some Greek plays. Nicolas de Chamfort eventually died in his small apartment on
April 13, 1794. Part of his manuscripts were stolen after his death. In
1795 appeared four volumes of his work, edited by his friend
Pierre-Louis Guingené. The American author Carl Sandburg said in 1916
in his Chicago Poems:
"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?" E.M. Cioran wrote approvingly of Samuel Beckett's fascination with Chamfort in Exercices d'admiration: Essais et portraits (1986). His translations of Chamfort appeared in Collected Poems (1977), where the epigrammatic prose of Maximes
was turned into verse. W.S. Merwin's translation of the seventh maxim is faithful
to the original: "Living is an ailment which is relieved every sixteen
hours by sleep. A palliative. Death is the cure." Beckett's version
goes like this: "sleep till death / healeth / come ease / this life
disease". (Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity by Shane Weller, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p. 62) For further reading: L'esprit de Chamfort by Léon Treich (1927); Sébastien-Roch-Nicolas Chamfort, un moraliste du XVIIIe siècle et son temps by Émile Dousset (1943); Chamfort Devant La Posterite, 1794-1984 by John Renwick (1986); Chamfort: A Biography by Claude Arnaud, translated by Deke Dusinberre (1992); 'Safeguarding the Nation's Past: Chamfort's Brief Career at the Bibliothèque Nationale' by Bette W. Oliver, in Libraries & Culture, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Fall, 1999); Chamfort: moraliste du siècle des lumières: essai by Paul Toublanc (2005); 'Nicolas Chamfort (1741-1794),' in Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love by Andrew Shaffer (2011); Mondes à l'envers: de Chamfort à Samuel Beckett by François Rastier (2018); Chamfort, ou, La subversion de la morale by Jean-Baptiste Bilger (2020); 'Poétique de l'émotion populaire dans les Tableaux historiques de la Révolution française de Nicolas Chamfort' by Cyril Francès, in Turmoil: Instability and Insecurity in the Eighteenth-century Francophone Text, edited by Síofra Pierse and Emma M. Dunne (2022) - Suom. Martti Anhava on suomentanut Chamfortilta Sivistyksen hedelmiä: mietteitä ja tapauksia (2005), valikoima teoksista Maximes et pensées ja Caractères et anecdotes. Selected works:
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