Chamfort.40 – That someone who knew humanity and the masses as well as Chamfort still joined the masses and did not stand aside in philosophical renunciation and defence, I can only explain as follows: one instinct in him was stronger than his wisdom and was never satisfied: his hatred of all nobility of blood; perhaps his mother’s old hatred, which was only too easy to explain and which he had sanctified through love of his mother – an instinct for revenge harking back to his boyhood, waiting for the hour to avenge his mother. And now his life and his genius – and alas! no doubt mostly the paternal blood in his veins – had seduced him to join the ranks of this nobility as an equal, for many, many years! But eventually he could no longer stand the sight of himself, the sight of the ‘old type of man’ under the old regime; he was gripped with a violent passion of repentance which led him to put on the clothes of the mob, as his kind of hairshirt! His bad conscience was his failure to take revenge. If Chamfort had remained just a little bit more a philosopher, the Revolution would not have had its tragic wit and sharpest sting: it would be considered a much stupider event and would not seduce so many minds. But Chamfort’s hatred and revenge educated a whole generation, and the most illustrious human beings passed through this school. Note that Mirabeau41 looked up to Chamfort as to his higher and older self from which he expected and endured impulses, warnings, and verdicts – Mirabeau, who as a human being belongs to a quite different order of greatness than even the foremost statesmen of yesterday and today. It is peculiar that despite such a friend and advocate – after all, we have Mirabeau’s letters to Chamfort – this wittiest of all moralists has remained a stranger to the French, no less than Stendhal,42 who has perhaps had the most thoughtful eyes and ears of all Frenchmen of this century. Is it that the latter basically had too much of the Dutchman or Englishman within himself to be tolerable to the Parisians? Whereas Chamfort, a man who was rich in depths and backgrounds of the soul – gloomy, suffering, ardent – a thinker who found laughter necessary as a remedy against life and who nearly considered himself lost on those days when he had not laughed – seems much more like an Italian, related to Dante and Leopardi, than a Frenchman! We know Chamfort’s last words: ‘Ah! mon ami’, he said to Sieyès,43 ‘je m’en vais enfin de ce monde, ou il faut que le creur se brise ou se bronze –’.44 Those are surely not the words of a dying Frenchman.