Nicolas Chamfort never wrote a treatise. What survives under his name is a heap of fragments—maxims, pensées, character sketches, anecdotes—assembled after a life spent mostly in conversation and in the margins of great events. The volume known as Maximes et Anecdotes gathers these under loose headings: philosophy and morals, man and society, politics, science and letters, the sentiments and passions, love and gallantry, marriage, and finally a long gallery of portraits drawn from the court and the salons of the old regime. The edition that fixed the shape most readers know opens not with Chamfort but with a biographical and critical study by P.-J. Stahl, dated Brussels, 1856, which sets the writer against the collapse of the world that had made him.
“C’est que je suis plus accoutumé à mes défauts qu’à ceux d’autrui.”
Stahl’s essay makes a case before the maxims begin. A man of letters in a revolutionary age, he argues, is caught either way: withdraw into pure art and he is taxed with egoism while the cannon roars; step into public affairs and the professional politicians distrust him, the crowd wonders why a successful dramatist would meddle in the state. Chamfort, born into a society that did not even grant literary work the status of property, lived on the goodwill of grandees and the pleasure of kings, and Stahl refuses to sneer at the pensions and protectors that were simply the conditions of the time. The essay defends Chamfort against Sainte-Beuve, who found him too severe a judge of a society he had seen only in its most artificial stratum. Stahl’s reply is that Chamfort meant to paint exactly that society, that before the Revolution there was scarcely any other to paint, and that a truth, once true, is true for every class. He quotes the maxim that in France they leave in peace those who set the fire and persecute those who sound the tocsin, and grants Chamfort the tocsin.
The Writer in Revolutionary Times
Stahl begins by weighing the peculiar difficulties a man of letters faces in a revolutionary age. If the writer stays sealed inside his art while the cannon roars, he is rightly taxed with egoism; the great poets of the past were the voice of their epoch and bled when their country bled. Yet if he marches with or against his time, he meets colder distrust than anyone: pure politicians fear he will not wear their ready-made airs, and the public wonders why a successful author would meddle in state affairs, telling him to go tell a story instead. Most people still see the writer as a trouvère, a minstrel fit to mark time for others but not to govern. Stahl finds the same inconsistency everywhere: men who think it natural for a shoemaker or a soldier to aspire to lead are astonished that a man whose mission is to study men should share the ambition. The fault, he concludes, lies neither with the man nor wholly with the profession, but with a public that prejudges instead of judging.
The Burdens of Notoriety
The profession itself carries one great disadvantage. On the world’s stage the writer is always in view, like an actor, with no private life—suffering all the disgraces of notoriety and none of the advantages of obscurity. Any folly of his is printed and never lost. The merchant or rentier, by contrast, may sin at ease; his defects go unknown, and when politics calls him, every prejudice favors him. He holds the precious independence of money—often a lying independence, since the rich man depends on his écus as the poor man on his poverty.
Servitude and Literary Property
In the old society where Chamfort was born, letters lived on the goodwill of great lords and the pleasure of kings; society did not even admit that literary work could constitute property. Yet these servile, sublime mercenaries freed the world, drawing liberty of thought from their very servitude—freeing everything except themselves. Stahl notes ironically that literary property is still not admitted as true property, and a footnote points to a practical scheme, a paying public domain, to secure writers and their heirs the fruit of their works.
Protectors and the Price of the Past
A talented man then had first to find a protector. Stahl defends Chamfort against reproach for this necessity of the times, which he endured like the proudest. He does not condemn Voltaire’s friendship with Frédéric, seeing Voltaire’s liberty of mind unconstrained on that throne’s steps. Condemning the past with the weapons it handed us is easy but not generous: had our grandfathers refused pensions, the nobility that paid them to be enlightened would have stayed in darkness, and many of Stahl’s opponents would not know spelling.
Shelter, Chabanon, and the Date of His Thoughts
Stahl recounts that M. A. Houssaye lodged Chamfort in “a literary hospital” for some seasons; he would have stayed longer without the friendship of Chabanon, who held a pension of twelve hundred livres on the Mercure and forced Chamfort to accept it. Chamfort wished to refuse, and the sensitive Chabanon took offense, his friendship not consenting to go unrecognized; the two nearly came to blows, but fortunately embraced. The thoughts on love, women, and friendship, and whatever in his maxims and anecdotes was inspired by his deep knowledge of the society of his time, probably date from this period.
Answering Sainte-Beuve
Sainte-Beuve finds Chamfort too severe, a cruel judge of that society. Stahl says that if Chamfort’s thoughts had lost their accuracy he would gladly agree; unfortunately they seem to have gained in truth with age, most looking as if written yesterday. Sainte-Beuve, defending the world only to quarrel with Chamfort, is harsher than Chamfort himself, claiming most of the maxims apply only to the very great world and turn false in a less factitious world closer to the family. Stahl answers on four grounds: Chamfort meant to paint exactly that society of the great, and one cannot reproach a man for doing well what he meant to do; before the Revolution a society of the small was not yet constituted, since the great claimed to represent all France; the society worth warning against was that one marching to the abyss, dragging France with it; and when a truth is true, it is true for all classes.
Women, Marriage, and the Tocsin
On women, love, and marriage Chamfort spoke in the manner of Molière and La Bruyère. Sainte-Beuve, alluding to his sarcasms against marriage, says he had seen marriage only in the great world, where it was so decried.
The Case Against Pleasure and Society
A speaker identified only as “M…” explains to the narrator why no pleasure seems to hold him: not insensibility, but that every pleasure strikes him as overpriced. Glory exposes a man to calumny; esteem demands continual care; pleasures require movement and bodily fatigue; society brings a thousand inconveniences, since everything is seen, reviewed, and judged. The world has offered him nothing better than what he finds within himself, and from repeated experiments he has grown, without apathy or indifference, as if immobile—his present position always seeming best because its goodness grows out of its very immobility. Love is a source of pain, pleasure without love lasts minutes, marriage is judged more than anything, the honor of being a father brings calamities, and keeping a household is an innkeeper’s trade. He concludes that rest, friendship, and thought are the only goods suited to a man past the age of folly.
Society as Decomposition
Further maxims follow. Reputation’s presence or absence is indifferent, but a bad reputation is a misfortune to avoid. Two men may be united for a time by false resemblances until the mistake ceases and they find themselves repelled at every point of contact. Society, the argument runs, is not the development of nature but its decomposition and complete recasting—a second edifice built from the ruins of the first. Fragments of the first are rediscovered with pleasure mixed with surprise, as when a naive natural sentiment escapes in society, charming more if the person is of higher rank, like a piece of ancient Doric or Corinthian architecture in a coarse modern building. One cannot live in society after the age of passions; it is tolerable only when one uses one’s stomach to amuse oneself and one’s person to kill time. What is said in circles, salons, suppers, and books is false or insufficient—the Italian per la predica, the Latin ad populum phaleras; what is true and instructive is what an honest man’s conscience says to his friend by the fireside. M… held that a penetrating spirit seeing society as it is would find only bitterness; one must turn one’s view to the pleasant side, regarding man as a monkey and society as the plank he leaps on—then everything becomes diverting and one keeps one’s health.
Diamonds, Vanity, and the Wood of Thieves
Men’s value, one maxim holds, is like diamonds: up to a certain size and purity they have a fixed price; beyond it they remain priceless and find no buyers. “Vain” means empty, and vanity is so wretched one can scarcely say worse than its name. A single man can sometimes be right against all peoples and all centuries. Man lives with himself and needs virtue; with others and needs honor. Burrhus should not be seen as absolutely virtuous—only in opposition to Narcisse; Sénèque and Burrhus are the honest men of a century that had none. France is a country where it is often useful to show one’s vices and always dangerous to show one’s virtues. Sénèque told a son unable to find the exordium of a speech: “Are you not ashamed to want to speak better than you can?”—applicable to those adopting principles stronger than their character. Seeing the rogueries of the small and the brigandage of those in place, one is tempted to regard society as a wood full of thieves, the most dangerous being the archers posted to arrest the others.
Nobility and Its Pretensions
The French natural character, runs the next section, is composed of the monkey’s and the lapdog’s qualities. Changing fashions are “the tax that the industry of the poor levies on the vanity of the rich.” Nature, to make a virtuous man or a man of genius, does not consult Chérin. Most nobles recall their ancestors roughly as an Italian cicerone recalls Cicero. Nobility, say the nobles, is an intermediary between king and people—”yes, like the hunting dog between the hunter and the hares.” The most respectable title of French nobility is descent from the thirty thousand armored men on iron-clad horses who fell upon eight or nine million naked men, the ancestors of the present nation; and to complete this respectability, the nobility recruits itself by adopting men who increased their fortune by stripping the poor unable to pay taxes. These are miserable human institutions, made to inspire contempt and horror, yet requiring respect and reverence. The impossibility of reaching great places unless one is a gentleman is one of the most fatal absurdities in almost all countries: “I seem to see donkeys forbidding carrousels and tournaments to horses.” At equal wit and enlightenment, the man born rich can never know nature, the human heart, and society as well as the poor man: where the one placed an enjoyment, the other consoled himself with a reflection. The richest of men is the thrifty; the poorest, the miser.
The Atheist’s Company and the Widow’s Name
The collection opens with a paradox about company: an atheist, M. D… says, is better to meet than a believer, since the sight of an atheist summons all the half-proofs of God’s existence, while a believer drags in crowds of half-proofs against it. From there the anecdotes turn to the uses of contempt and consolation. M. de L…, hoping to keep the newly widowed madame de B… from remarrying, tells her it is a fine thing to bear the name of a man who can no longer do foolish things. M…, asked about his favourite formula of disdain—”the next-to-last of men”—explains that he says it to discourage no one, since there is a crowd. Madame de Rochefort, offered knowledge of the future, declines: it resembles the past too much.
The King in Bed and the Silverware
Madame Desparbès, in bed with Louis XV, is told she has slept with all his subjects; she excuses the duc de Choiseul (so powerful), the maréchal de Richelieu (so witty), Manville (such a fine leg), and for the duc d’Aumont, who has none of these, pleads that he is so attached to His Majesty. An old man advises the too-sensitive narrator to learn from life to suffer life. A young courtier accused of loving girls is defended by a friend: “Exaggeration! malice! he also has women.” The king asks the duc d’Ayen whether he sent his silverware to the mint; the duke says no, and the king says he sent his. D’Ayen replies that when Jesus Christ died on Good Friday he knew he would rise on Sunday. Madame de… describes M. B… as honest but mediocre and prickly, like perch—white, wholesome, insipid, full of bones. M. de B…, told of false public judgments about him, says coldly it is fine for a beast and a scoundrel like the present public to judge a character of his stamp. M… explains madame de B…’s preference for M. de L… by analogy: Genoa, rich and powerful, offered its sovereignty to several kings who refused it, while war was made for Corsica, which produces only chestnuts but was proud and independent.
Danced Maxims and the Most Serene Bankruptcy
A joker, having seen Corneille’s famous “Qu’il mourût” danced as a ballet at the Opéra, asked Noverre to make La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes dance. The marquis de Villotte called M. de Guéménée’s bankruptcy the “most serene bankruptcy.” Fifty-six violations of public faith are counted from Henri IV through the ministry of cardinal de Loménie; M. D… applies to our kings’ frequent bankruptcies two Racine lines on a throne half founded on promised faith, rarely kept. M. de Malesherbes tells M. de Maurepas the king should be urged to visit the Bastille; Maurepas replies he must be kept from it, or he would no longer want anyone put there. A very poor man who wrote a book against the government complains that the Bastille does not arrive while his rent is due. Helvétius, beautiful as Cupid in youth, sits near mademoiselle Gaussin; a financier offers her six hundred louis for favours, and she replies she would give two hundred if he would come with that face. Asked if he will marry, M… says why—to pay the king capitation and the three twentieths after his death? M. de Th… says he would like Florian’s insipid bergeries if wolves were added.
The Curé, the Dying, and the Well-Intentioned
The curé de Saint-Sulpice visits madame de Mazarin in her last illness; she tells him the butter of the Enfant-Jésus is no longer nearly so good, and it is his job to fix it since the Enfant-Jésus is a dependency of his Church. A man asked about M…, once his benefactor, now hating him, asks permission for some incredulity, hoping M… will not force him to change into respect for himself the only sentiment he needs to keep toward him. Under “Le bien mal fait,” after deliberate crime and evil come the bad effects of good intentions, good actions harmful to public society, good done to the wicked, follies of good nature, abuses of misapplied philosophy, clumsiness in serving friends, false applications of useful or honest maxims. The maréchal de Biron, gravely ill, wants to confess and says before friends what he owes God, the king, and the State; a friend interrupts: be quiet, you will die insolvent.
The Vanity of the Archbishop of Reims
The archbishop of Reims carried his vanity about rank and birth so conspicuously that all France knew it. The duc d’A…, returning from his government of Berri after years away from court, had his carriage overturn and break in bitter cold on the road to Versailles. Told the repairs would take two hours, he noticed a relay standing ready and learned it belonged to the archbishop, also bound for Versailles. The duke sent his people ahead but for one, ordered to stay silent until called. When the prelate arrived, the duke had a servant of the archbishop’s ask whether a place might be found for an honest man whose carriage had broken. The archbishop interrogated the man: what sort of person, well dressed, does he keep servants, is he a gentleman? Only at the word gentleman did he consent. The duke entered and saluted; the archbishop barely shifted. Catching sight of a Saint-Louis cross, he said he regretted the delay but could not give a seat to a man of no standing—he understood the duke was a gentleman and had served. Asked whether he was going to Versailles, and “to the bureaux, apparently?”, the duke said no, he was going to thank the king. At that word the archbishop drew back and made a little room. The duke explained: two years earlier he had married his daughter to a poor man of great name, and His Majesty had promised the son-in-law the first vacant government. Which city? A province, said the duke. The archbishop recoiled into the corner of the carriage. The duke revealed it was his own government of Berri, which he wished to pass on. Now frantic to escape, the archbishop protested his confusion, blamed the rascal lackey and d’Hozier the genealogist, and declared himself happy to have trusted the duke’s word that he was a gentleman, since so many falsely claim it. The duke answered: forgive your lackey, who only called me an honest man; forgive d’Hozier, who exposed you to receiving an untitled old soldier; and forgive me for not proving my nobility before entering your carriage.
Fronsac’s Wounded Pride
M. de Fronsac, visiting a panorama, was addressed by the artist—who did not know him and saw only a Saint-Louis cross—as plain “chevalier.” The slight so stung him that he invented a story in which one of his own servants called him “monseigneur.” M. de Genlis cut him off at the word, observing that he would be taken for a bishop.
Vatri’s Calculated Delay
Pressed to solicit a vacant place at the Collège Royal, the abbé Vatri said “we shall see” and did nothing; the post went to another. Told of it, he said he would now ask for it: before, he had a hundred competitors; now only one. He asked, and obtained it.
Vergennes on Breteuil
A relative asked Vergennes why he allowed the baron de Breteuil to reach the ministry of Paris when Breteuil stood ready to succeed him. Vergennes answered that Breteuil, always abroad, was unknown here, held a usurped reputation, and passed with many for worthy of the ministry; he must be undeceived, put on display, shown for what he was.
Definitions and Small Reckonings
A witty man defined Versailles as a country where, on descending, one must always appear to be climbing—honoring oneself by frequenting what one despises. Collé, having placed a considerable sum at ten percent with a financier who by the second year had paid nothing, told him that when one places money en viager, it is to be paid during one’s lifetime. A guest drank excellent wine in silence, then praised a mediocre vintage; told the first was wine of the gods and the second ten-sous wine, he replied that the other needed no recommendation. The English satirist Donne, urged to thunder against vices but spare the vicious, answered: how condemn cards and pardon sharpers?
Mirabeau’s Letters to Chamfort
The correspondence turns personal. Mirabeau, writing from the rue de la Roquette, urges Chamfort to dream up some great publishing scheme to propose to Panckouke, and mocks the blunder of an in-8 edition of the Académie des inscriptions. He fears Chamfort works too much and gives too much of his heart away, doubting that his philosophy serves him with women as with other subjects; he marshals the ancients—Euripides, the censor Metellus Numidicus—to argue that the sex escapes all order and combination. From London he reports Henriette’s pleasure at being taken for a beautiful Englishwoman, a mob scene in the park dispersed by a Frenchman’s eloquence, and the illness that drains his purse at a louis a visit.
Mirabeau’s Letters from London
The volume’s final stretch opens with a run of letters from Mirabeau, written from Hatton Street in Holborn on 30 November 1781. He tells Chamfort that news of his health and habits brings both pleasure and sharp regret; he wishes he had spent the winter near him, since it is his mind that profits from the friendship while his soul, “widowed” in philosophy, miscarries for want of a listener. He is collecting many new relations and will arrange them later, “in the hot-house” of Chamfort’s talents. He promises several good works, among them a history of one of the century’s most horrible crimes, materials for which chance put in his hands—a “great vengeance offered to humanity.” A great work of morals or philosophy, though, he will never attempt except beside Chamfort, the temper of his soul. He agrees to be pleased with Chamfort’s friends if they secure him twelve thousand livres of income; otherwise he will not answer for relapses. His “poor little one” is waking and loves Chamfort with all her heart. A postscript explains the delay: he has translated and appended matter to Dr. Price’s pamphlet on the American revolution, with a discourse and notes of his own.
Press Freedom and the Academy
A second London letter chides Chamfort’s silence while worrying over his weak constitution and fiery temperament, which preserve but often clash. He does not love literature enough to enrich it at Chamfort’s expense. He mocks the notion of suppressing books “up to and including the Bible,” calls intercepted letters useless except as an occasion to make money, and derides the “distributors of glory” and the Académie—then reveals he is soliciting a place there, never for himself. The candidate is Target: few literary titles, perhaps, but vast reading, clear knowledge, a head full of good things, current in political economy and philosophy, and the man who struck the patriciate in the Quiessat trial. He is also, Mirabeau swears, perfectly honest, good, warm, pure, incorruptible, and his particular friend, who once served him unasked. Chamfort should ask where the most worthy man is and give Target his vote out of friendship; otherwise the Academy will elect titled scoundrels or literary buffoons.
Necker, Turgot, and the Conservateur
Mirabeau reports his own affairs: a singular book of research made and printed in a month in London, where printing runs twice as fast as in France; his Conservateur is “hooked” because a French bookseller must carry half the costs, so Chamfort congratulated him too soon. A friend’s illness left him at his wits’ end, though he is saved for a couple of months. He announces Necker’s three-volume work on financial administration, eighteen thousand copies ready to prove to the whole earth that France has lost a good servant—and that the servant is sorry. Mirabeau, who knows Necker’s financial talents and ministerial operations, judges him unfavorably: abandoning his country when he could have saved it is “a nasty bit of business.” Turgot, by contrast, would not have refused to save a molehill where liberty was said to be in danger. If the Conservateur does not take hold, he will likely return to France.
The Closing Table of Contents
The volume ends not with prose but with the book’s Table des Matières, a long architecture of headings and page numbers, followed by publisher advertisements. The sections map Chamfort’s themes: social exclusions, force in politics, France as the Turkey of Europe, liberty in England and America, the French peasant, the people and the poor, the people and kings, prejudice among the 1789 deputies, suicide, subjects or citizens, Tacitus and Livy. A second section treats the nobility, the great, the rich and the world—courtiers, the court, absurd privileges, the origins of nobility in France, the rich and the poor, universal solidarity. Further sections cover science, fine arts and letters (the Académie française, genius, Molière, the poverty of writers, posterity); sentiments and passions (ambition, self-love, envy, glory, vanity); the dignity of character and the love of retreat (Diogenes, independence, solitude); friendship; and women and marriage—love, divorce, women’s friendship, the dreamed woman, women and writing. The catalogue of titles closes the book.
The maxims themselves are not a system, and it is a mistake to read them as one. Chamfort works by incision: a single sentence, often built on an antithesis, that leaves a small wound. “Making one’s fortune reduces largely to the art of knowing how to bore people,” he writes, and the same art, he adds, succeeds with women. Esteem is worth more than celebrity, consideration more than renown, honor more than glory. Most of our follies are mere stupidities; even in the sage there is more folly than wisdom. The tone shifts from the epigram to something colder—one is happy or unhappy through countless things that do not show, are not said, and cannot be said—and then to a hard-won Epicureanism: enjoy and make others enjoy, without harming yourself or anyone, and that is all of morality.
Society, in these pages, is a second building raised from the ruins of nature. Fragments of the first survive inside it, and when a naive feeling escapes in a drawing room it charms precisely because it is a piece of old Doric stone set into a coarse modern wall. What is said in circles, at suppers, in books is false or insufficient; what is true is what an honest man’s conscience says to his friend by the fireside. The man who makes himself amiable because he genuinely enjoys a society is the only one playing the honest man’s part. Against this, Chamfort sets the value of persons, which he compares to diamonds: up to a certain size and purity they have a fixed price, and beyond it they are priceless and find no buyers.
The political maxims carry the argument outward. Nobility is an intermediary between king and people, yes—like the hunting dog between the hunter and the hares. The most respectable title of the French nobility is descent from the thirty thousand armored men who fell upon eight or nine million naked ones. At equal wit, the man born rich can never know the human heart as the poor man does, because where one placed an enjoyment the other consoled himself with a reflection. And the sentence Stahl singles out as the tocsin: society is never composed but of two great classes, those who have more dinners than appetite and those who have more appetite than dinners. Chamfort did not invent the poor, but he made the well-fed hear them.
The portraits and anecdotes are the book’s other half, and they are not decoration. A great lord reminds a writer of his rank and is told: I do not ignore what I owe to you, but I know it is easier to be above me than beside me. Madame Brisard, asked how she could multiply her lovers, answers that each time she believed that one would be the last. A miser with a toothache reflects that he sees he will have to bear the expense. Louis XV asks the duc d’Ayen whether he sent his silver to the mint; the duke says no, and the king says he sent his. These are not jokes for their own sake. Balzac’s remark, quoted in the volume, is exact: Chamfort and Rivarol put books into a bon mot, where today one barely finds a bon mot in a book. His mots were acts. He gave Sieyès the formula of the third estate; he gave the soldiers the device of war on the châteaux and peace on the cottages; he translated the revolutionary slogan of fraternity or death into “be my brother or I kill you.”
The end is not a maxim but a fact, and the book’s editors place it where it belongs, in the life rather than the aphorisms. Hérault de Séchelles asked Chamfort to write against the freedom of the press; he refused with indignation and was taken to the Madelonnettes by order of the Committee of Public Safety. The month in prison seemed a century, and he came out aged, saying there is no middle between life and death—he must open his eyes on the sky or close them in the tomb. He swore never to fall alive into the hands of his persecutors. When a second arrest was attempted he did not flee. Lodged at the Bibliothèque nationale, named librarian by Roland, he shut himself in his cabinet, loaded a pistol, and shot himself in the forehead; the ball shattered the top of his nose and sank his right eye. He was astonished to live, and resolved to die: he took a razor, cut at his throat, slashed his breast, struck at his heart, opened veins and hamstrings, and was overcome by pain.
What remains is a body of thought that refuses consolation. Chamfort is not a builder; he clears ground. The Revolution he had helped to arm turned on him, and the maxims read afterward like the ledger of a man who saw the mechanism of privilege from the inside and would not pretend it was anything but a machine for extracting dinners from appetites. Stahl’s essay, for all its advocacy, ends by conceding the difficulty: a truth that is bitter is still the remedy, and the patient who demands a sweet potion is only postponing the cure. The book’s afterlife belongs to that sentence and to the two classes it describes, which the nineteenth century called the social question and which has not yet been answered.
