to society and to literary success by dint of competing for and
winning academic prizes. On the second occasion of his competition he
defeated La Harpe. Afterwards Madame Helvetius assisted him, and at last
he received from Chabanon (a third-rate man of letters, who may be most
honourably mentioned here) a small annuity which made him independent.
It is said that he married, and that his wife died six months
afterwards. He was elected to the Academy, and patronised by all sorts
of persons, from the queen downwards. But at the outbreak of the
Revolution he took the popular side, though he could not continue long
faithful to it. In the Terror he was menaced with arrest, tried to
commit suicide, and died horribly mutilated in 1794. Chamfort's literary
works are considerable in bulk, but only a few of them have merit. His
tragedies are quite worthless, his comedy, _La Jeune Indienne_, not much
better. His verse tales exceed in licentiousness his models in La
Fontaine, but fall far short of them in elegance and humour. His
academic essays are heavy and scarcely intelligent. But his brief
witticisms and his short anecdotes and apophthegms hardly admit a rival.
Chamfort was a man soured by his want of birth, health, and position,
and spoilt in mental development by the necessity of hanging on to the
great persons of his time. But for a kind of tragi-comic satire, a
_saeva indignatio_, taking the form of contempt of all that is exalted
and noble, he has no equal in literature except Swift.

[Sidenote: Rivarol.]

The life of Rivarol was also an adventurous one, but much less sombre.
He was born about 1750, of a family which seems to have had noble
connections, but which, in his branch of it, had descended to
innkeeping. Indeed it is said that Riverot, and not Rivarol, was the
name which his father actually bore. He himself, however, first assumed
the title of Chevalier de Parcieux, and then that of Comte de Rivarol.
The way to literary distinction in those days was either the theatre or
criticism, and Rivarol, with the acuteness which characterised him,
knowing that he had no talent for the former, chose the latter. His
translation (with essay and notes) of Dante is an extraordinarily clever
book, and his discourse on the universality of the French tongue, which
followed, deserves the same description. It was not, however, in mere
criticism that Rivarol's forte lay, though he long afterwards continued
to exhibit his acuteness i