It is easy to mistake the real nature of aristocratic French society in the eighteenth century. We are apt to think of it as haughtily exclusive, divided by a great gulf from the classes below it. The great gulf might be there in theory, but in practice any one of agreeable presence, good manners and a pretty wit was assured a safe passage across. To maintain his position Chamfort had not, it seems, to play the part of toady; indeed he apparently found the opposite tactics the better. In one of his anecdotes he tells us of a respectful admirer of women who has to confess that, had he despised them, he would have enjoyed the favours of more. In like manner it may be that Chamfort’s professed contempt for society endeared him to it. The acidity of his reflections no doubt had its charm for a world which delighted in verbal encounters, in dialectic and philosophy, and, while studiously avoiding the practice of morality, showed appreciation of it by packing it into maxims, dialogues, and tales. It is, moreover, one of the redeeming features of a corrupt and frivolous society that, as a rule, it has a sense of humour and can laugh at its own follies. This is what your earnest fanatic cannot do, and accordingly when Chamfort, with his power of seeing more than one side to a question, aimed his sarcasms at the revolutionaries in their turn, he drew down their wrath upon his head. With Chamfort’s progress in society I have not space to deal adequately. Suffice it that he made influential friends, especially amongst women, including Marie Antoinette, got various comfortable little pensions settled upon him, travelled, was elected to the Forty Immortals, and, much to the surprise of his friends, married and was devoted to his wife, a clever woman of the world, till her death six months later. Among his best friends was Mirabeau, and, curious as it may seem to those who remember the prominent part taken by the latter in the history of the time, his relation to Chamfort was that of disciple to master. With all Mirabeau’s vigour he lacked the other’s subtlety and tact, and he came to regard him as a kind of external conscience. “Never a day passes ... in which I do not find myself saying--“_Chamfort froncerait le sourcil, ne faisons pas, n’écrivons pas cela._”” So far indeed did Mirabeau carry his admiration, that he employed Chamfort, as the young preacher had done, to write his speeches for him. So says Rivarol, to whom Mirabeau appeared “a great sponge always swollen with the ideas of others,” and documentary evidence bears him out.