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Updated: May 21, 2025
Ah! as Chamfort said, one has to swallow a viper every morning to endure the life of Paris. Well, at any rate, Art remains to a few of us; they can't prevent us from cultivating it " "And besides, my dear fellow, you have a consolation which few artists possess; the future is yours," said Bixiou.
It is the secondary and indirect character of the love of seclusion to which Chamfort alludes in the following passage, couched in his sarcastic vein: On dit quelquefois d'un homme qui vit seul, il n'aime pas la société. You will find a similar sentiment expressed by the Persian poet Sadi, in his Garden of Roses.
Yet Chamfort is the author of the not unwholesome saying that "The most wasted of all days is that on which one has not laughed." One of his maxims lets us into the secret of his misanthropy. "Whoever," he said, "is not a misanthropist at forty can never have loved mankind." It is easy to know what this means.
As they appeared at the entrance a knight came up and saluted her. "I am intrusted by the duke with the honour of escorting you to your lodgings," he said; "I am Hugo de Chamfort, the duke's chamberlain." After assisting her into the saddle he mounted a horse which an attendant brought up and placed himself by her side.
I see pass before me the fair and elegant dames of that galaxy of wit and beauty, Mesdames de Longueville, Lafayette, and de Sévigné, fluttering their fans as they listened and replied to the gallant compliments of Voiture, Ménage, Chapelain, Desmarets, or De Réaux, or to the spirituelle causerie of Chamfort.
"I can talk daggers," he had said when younger, and he wrote the greater part of these, though some were contributed by Wilhelm Schlegel, by his admirable wife Caroline, by Schleiermacher, and Novalis. The root of this form lies in French thinking and expression especially the short deliverances of Chamfort, the epigrammatist of the French Revolution.
The bourgeois, limited scope of the art in vogue this was the burden of his reiterated rabid attacks; art watered down to suit the public's insipid palate, and he quoted Chamfort furiously: "Combien de sots faut-il pour faire un public?" the art of simpering prettiness, without root or fruit in life, the art of absolute convention.
Jacques, le fataliste is tiresome; Le Neveu de Rameau gives at first the impression that it is going to amount to something, to something powerful such as the Satiricon of Petronius, or El Buscon of Quevedo; but at the end, it is nothing. The only writer of the pre-revolutionary period who can be read today with any pleasure and this, perhaps, is because he does not attempt anything is Chamfort.
I'd never have got a court-martial if I'd been with my outfit. I was in the Base Hospital 15 with pneumonia." "Tough luck!" "It was a hell of a note." "Say, Dook, your outfit was working with ours at Chamfort that time, wasn't it?" "You mean when we evacuated the nut hospital?" "Yes, wasn't that hell?"
Rops the artist, with the big and subtle style, the etcher of the Sataniques, of Le Pendu, of La Buveuse d'Absinthe and half a hundred other masterpieces, is set aside for the witty illustrator, with the humour of a Rabelais and the cynicism of Chamfort.
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