Credit to Chamfort
Sir: If Dr A. L. Rowse (June 15) knew as much about the French writers of
maxims as he does about the Age of
Elizabeth (but, of course, why should he?) he would not have misquoted Chamfort's famous line — L'amour, tel qu'il existe dons la Societe, nest que l'echange de deux fantaisies et le contact de deux epidermes and attributed it to Anatole France. Chamfort's Maxims were first published in 1796, in London, by a French printer-who had fled from the Terror and set up shop in Gerrard Street, Soho.
In an article in History Today three years ago I suggested that one reason for the extraordinary neglect of Chamfort in his own country (no biography has yet been published in France) might well be because his literary successors were so busy appropriating his epigrams in order to lend wit to their characters that they shrank from identifying the gold mine which they had systematically plundered. Anatole France, it seems, was merely carrying on the naughty practice which Balzac had begun.
Alaric Jacob
6 Kassala Road. London SW11
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