The Curious Lives — And Deaths — Of Writers And Artists

Nicolas Chamfort: "That son-of-a-bitch just slit his own throat!"

Under threat of arrest during the Reign of Terror, the French writer Nicolas Chamfort (1741 — 1794) shot himself in the head and slit his own throat. Then died of pneumonia while recovering in his bed.

Whereas Lavoisier was guillotined in the Reign of Terror.

“A good book is twice as good if it’s short.” Said Baltasar Gracian.

On August 24, 1847, Charlotte Bronte, writing under a pseudonym Currer Bell, mailed off her unsolicited  manuscript Jane Eyre to a London publisher — and saw it in print seven weeks later.

Franz Kafka was a vegetarian.

Balzac, who was five-foot-one, wrote over 2000 characters into his Comedie Humaine.

Saul of Tarsus — AKA Saint Paul — probably participated in the stoning of Saint Stephen.

Tarsus is where Cleopatra arrives on her barge to meet Mark Antony, on the river Cydnus, in Turkey.

Thackery convinced himself that Desdemona did actually have an affair with Cassio.

T.S. Eliot’s first wife Vivian insisted upon washing her own bedsheets, even when staying at a hotel.

There is no description of Helen’s beauty anywhere in the Iliad.

“The Little Marcel” — Proust was called, all his life.

“Do you think up that material when you’re drunk?” asked William Faulkner’s cousin.

“No great talent has ever existed without a tinge of madness,” Seneca said Aristotle said.

One of Robert Frost’s daughters went insane. One of his son’s committed suicide.

“Life consists of what a [wo]man is thinking of all day,” said Emerson.

Salvardo Dali once gave a lecture in London while wearing a diving helmut. And nearly suffocated as a result.

“He alters and retouches the same phrases incessantly, and paces up and down like a madman,” reported a pupil of Chopin’s.

“Through the dim purple air of Dante fly those who have stained the world with the beauty of their sin,” wrote Oscar Wilde.

Captain Ahab is a Quaker.