uil. Here in 1783 he had met Mirabeau, with whom he remained to
the last on terms of intimate friendship. whom he assisted with money
and influence, and one at least of whose speeches--that on the
Academies--he wrote.

The outbreak of the Revolution made a profound change in the relations
of Chamfort's life. Theoretically he had long been a republican, and he
now threw himself into the new movement with almost fanatical ardour,
devoting all his small fortune to the revolutionary propaganda. His old
friends of the court he forgot. "Those who pass the river of
revolutions," he said, "have passed the river of oblivion." Until the
31st of August 1791 he was secretary of the Jacobin club; he became a
street orator and entered the Bastille among the first of the storming
party. He worked for the _Mercure de France_, collaborated with Ginguene
in the _Feuille villageoise_, and drew up for Talleyrand his _Adresse au
peuple francais_.

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 Bibliotheque Nationale, 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 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--_"Moi, Sebastien-Roch-Nicolas
Chamfort, declare avoir voulu mourir en homme libre plutot que d'etre
reconduit en esclave dans une maison d'arret"_--which he signed in a
firm hand and in his own blood. He did not die at once, but lingered on
until the 13th of April 1794 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 ("_Qu'est-ce que le Tiers-Etat? Tout. Qu'a-t-il?
Rien_"), and to Sieyes did Chamfort retail his supreme sarcasm, the
famous "_Je m'en vais enfin de ce monde ou il faut que le coeur se brise
ou se bronze._" The maker of