[2] In 1790, the French Revolution drove his parents out of France with their seven children, and they went successively to Liège, the Hague, Würzburg, and Bayreuth, and possibly Hamburg, before settling in Berlin.

There, in 1796, the young Chamisso was fortunate in obtaining the post of page-in-waiting to the queen of Prussia, and in 1798 he entered a Prussian infantry regiment as an ensign to train for a career as an army officer.

[citation needed] Shortly thereafter, thanks to the Peace of Tilsit, his family was able to return to France, but Chamisso remained in Prussia and continued his military career.

Placed on parole, he went to France, but both his parents were dead; returning to Berlin in the autumn of 1807, he obtained his release from the Prussian service early the following year.

Homeless and without a profession, disillusioned and despondent, Chamisso lived in Berlin until 1810, when through the services of an old friend of the family he was offered a professorship at the lycée at Napoléonville in the Vendée.

[1] He set out to take up the post, but instead joined the circle of Madame de Staël, and followed her in her exile to Coppet in Switzerland, where, devoting himself to botanical research, he remained nearly two years.

On his return in 1818 he was made custodian of the botanical gardens in Berlin, and was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences, and in 1819 he married his friend Hitzig's foster daughter Antonie Piaste (1800–1837).

Chamisso's travels and scientific researches restrained for a while the full development of his poetical talent, and it was not until his forty-eighth year that he turned back to literature.

[7] Chamisso's earliest writings, which include a verse translation of the tragedy Le Comte de Comminge in which "heilsam" is used in place of "heilig", show a 20-year-old still struggling to master his new language, and a number of his early poems are in French.

Frauenliebe und -leben (1830), a cycle of lyrical poems which was set to music by Robert Schumann, by Carl Loewe, and by Franz Paul Lachner, is particularly famous.

In the lyrical expression of the domestic emotions he displays a fine felicity, and he knew how to treat with true feeling a tale of love or vengeance.