Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/395

Rh secretary. The man was then some forty years of age ; he was fast growing misanthropical; he was &quot; gai mais ombrageux ;&quot; he was a Bohemian naturally and by habit. He resigned his post in the prince s household, and retired into solitude at Auteuil. There, comparing the authors of old with the men of his own time, he uttered the famous mot that proclaims the superiority of the dead over the living as companions; and there too he presently fell in love. The lady, attached to the household of the Duchesse de Maine, was forty-eight years old, but clever, amusing, a woman of the world ; and Chamfort married her. They left Auteuil, and went to Vaudouleurs, near Etampes, where in six months Madame Chamfort died. The widowed epicurean travelled, lived in Holland for a space with M. de Narbonne, and returning to Paris received the Academy arm-chair left vacant by the death of Sainte-Pelaye in 1781. He haunted the court, and made himself loved 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. Among the many men of mark assem bled round him there by his fine faculty of pregnant speech, he made the acquaintance and gained the friendship of Mirabeau, whom he assisted with orations, and whom he followed heart and soul into the storm and tumult of the young Revolution. He forgot his old friends (&quot; ceux quipassent la fleuve des revolutions ont passe la fleuve de I oubli&quot;); he frequented the clubs, and for a time was secretary of that of the Jacobins ; he became a street orator ; he entered the Bastille among the first of the storming party ; he worked for the Mercure de France, a royalist print in which he depreciated kingship. 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 Bibliotkeque Nationals, to a share in the direction of which he had been appointed by Roland, he was taken to the Madelonnettes. Released for a moment, he was threatened again with arrest; but to this brilliant free-lance of thought captivity had been intolerable, and he had determined to prefer death to a repetition of the moral and physical restraint to which he had been subjected. He attempted suicide, with pistol and with poniard ; and, horribly hacked and shattered, dictated to those who came to arrest him the well-known declaration &quot;Jfoi, Scbastien- Roch-Nicolas Ckamfort, declare avoir voidu mourir en homme libre plutdt que d etre conduit en e&clave dans line prison which he signed in a firm hand and in his own blood. He did not die at once, but lingered on a while in charge of a gendarme, for whose wardship he paid a crown a day. To the Abbe Sieyes Chamfort had given fortune in the title of a pamphlet (&quot; Qu est-ce que le Tiers-tat ] Tout, Qu a-t-il ? Rien &quot;), and to Sieyes did Chamfort retail his supreme sarcasm, the famous &quot; Je m en vais enfin de ce monde ou il faut que le coeur se brise ou se bronze.&quot; The maker of constitutions followed the dead wit to the grave. The writings of Chamfort, which include comedies, politi cal articles, literary criticisms, portraits, letters, and verses, are colourless and uninteresting in the extreme. As a talker, however, he was of extraordinary force. His Jfaximes et Pens e*, 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 pschologically less important than those of the ducal moralist, are as significant in their violence and iconoclastic spirit of the period of storm and preparation that gave them birth as the Reflexions in their exquisite 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 &quot; well-minted coins that retain their value,&quot; and to keen arrows that &quot; arrivent brusquement et sij/lent encore.&quot; An edition of his works CEuvres completes de Nicolas Chamfort, 5 volumes was published at Paris in 1824-25. A selection CEuvres de Chamfort in one volume, appeared in 1852, with a biographical and critical preface by Arsne Houssaye, reprinted from the Revue des Deux Mondes. See also Sainte-Beuve, Causeries de Lundi.  CHAMISSO, (1781-1838), poet, botanist, and voyager, was by family, birth, and the educa tion of childhood, a Frenchman, by his&quot; after-life, his marriage, and his literary activity, a German. He was ! born in 1781 at the castle of Boncourt in Champagne, and traced his descent from a respectable line of French I knights, who derived their title from the ancient town of Chamesson or Cambisonum, near Chatillon-sur-Seine. The quiet home-life at Boncourt was broken up by the Revolu tion in 1790, and the Chamissos, parents and children, were forced, like so many of their rank, to leave their country, and find such footing as might chance in a foreign land. And though in after years the main part of the family was permitted to settle again on their native soil, several of the younger members were left behind, where they had begun to take root. Of these was Adalbert, who had in 1796 obtained a situation as page to the queen of Prussia, and in 1798 entered the military service with the rank of ensign. To his professional studies he devoted, himself with ardour, and he attracted the royal attention by some of his writings ; but in the society of his comrades he was made bitterly to feel that he was not regarded as one of themselves, and it was not altogether with regret that he found himself in 1806 set free from the army. Meanwhile he had formed a friendship with several con genial spirits, such as Hitzig, Yarnhagen von Ense and Neumann ; and with the last two he joined in the publica tion of the Musenalmanach, which first appeared in 1803. A visit to Madame de Stael at Coppet was a pleasing interruption to his ordinary course of life, and has afforded the reader of his letters some amusing description of that eccentric woman, who alternately flattered Chamisso for his ability and scolded him soundly for his inattention to etiquette. The study of botany, which he began at Coppet, was prosecuted with so much persistence and success that it became his professional subject. In 1815 he was chosen botanist of the expedition for the circumnavigation of the world, which was originated by Romanzoff, and conducted by Kotzebue ; and on his return in 1818 he was appointed custodian of the botanical gardens at Berlin. Much to his own advantage and comfort, he obtained the hand of Antonie Piaste, a young lady of eighteen years ; and the rest of his life was spent in steady professional labour, relieved by kindly intercourse with an increasing circle of friends. Among those with whom he became acquainted were August Neander, Freiligrath, and Andersen. It cannot be said of Chamisso, as he himself affirmed of Heine, that he was a poet to the very tips of his fingers ; but the poetic element in his nature was genuine and strong, and, in spite of the unfavourable circumstances of his life, his tendency towards literary expression was very early displayed. In estimating his success as a writer, it should not be forgotten that he was cut off from his native speech and from his natural current of thought and feeling. None of his works perhaps can be called great ; but he has none the less enriched his adopted language with several poems 