His good looks and ready wit brought him attention; but, though endowed with immense physical strength – Madame de Craon called him "Hercules under the guise of Adonis" (Hercule]] sous la figure d'Adonis) – he lived so hard that he was glad to have the opportunity for a rest cure in the town of Spa when the Belgian minister in Paris, M. van Eyck, invited him to accompany him to Germany in 1761.

On his return to Paris, Chamfort produced a successful comedy, The Young Indian Girl (La Jeune Indienne, 1764), following it with a series of epistles in verse, essays and odes.

Until then, he lived from hand to mouth, mainly on the hospitality of people who gave him board and lodging in exchange for the pleasure of the conversation for which he was famous.

Thus assisted, he was able to go to the baths of Contrexéville and to spend some time in the country, where he wrote an Eloge on La Fontaine which won the prize of the Academy of Marseilles in 1774.

Disliking the constraints of court life, he became increasingly discontented, and after a year he resigned his post in the prince's household and retired to Auteuil.

He fell in love with and married a lady attached to the household of the duchesse du Maine; she was 48 years old, clever, amusing, and a woman of the world.

He worked for the Mercure de France, collaborated with Pierre-Louis Ginguené in the Feuille villageoise, and drew up for Talleyrand his Addresse au peuple français.

Fingered by an assistant in the Bibliothèque Nationale, to a share in the direction of which he had been appointed[clarification needed] by Jean Marie Roland, he was taken to the prison des Madelonnettes.

[2] He dictated to those who came to arrest him the well-known declaration Moi, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort, déclare avoir voulu mourir en homme libre plutôt que d'être reconduit en esclave dans une maison d'arrêt ("I, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort, hereby declare my wish to die a free man rather than to be brought (again) as a slave in a prison") which he signed in a firm hand.

His Maximes et Pensées, highly praised by John Stuart Mill, are, after those of La Rochefoucauld, among the most brilliant and suggestive sayings of the modern era.

His aphorisms, less systematic and psychologically less important than those of La Rochefoucauld, are as significant in their violence and iconoclastic spirit of the period of storm and preparation that gave them birth as the Réflexions in their exquisite restraint and elaborate subtlety are characteristic of the tranquil elegance of their epoch.

Although situated at the exact opposite of the political spectrum (see French Revolution) the maxims of Antoine de Rivarol are among those that easily compare in acidity and brilliance.