Wealth & Money Quote by Nicolas Chamfort

Chamfort’s line cuts with the elegant cruelty of a man who watched the Enlightenment’s ideals get mugged in a dark alley by status, patronage, and panic. “Preoccupation” is the key insult: not money itself, not even wanting it, but the mental occupation it demands. He’s diagnosing a personality type that doesn’t merely need resources; it needs money as a constant measuring device, a portable morality. That fixation becomes a “great test” because it reveals what the person is made of: if your attention collapses into accounting, you’ve already confessed your scale.

The second clause is the twist of the knife. For “great ones,” money is still a test, just not a decisive one. Chamfort isn’t romanticizing poverty or pretending genius is above material need. He’s arguing that larger natures distribute their seriousness across more than one axis: ethics, curiosity, pride, love, work, risk. Money can pressure them, even compromise them, but it doesn’t exhaust their identity. They can be bought, cornered, or distracted, yet the transaction doesn’t define the whole creature.

Context matters: Chamfort lived among salons and aristocratic benefactors, then through revolutionary upheaval, when fortunes flipped overnight and virtue was loudly advertised by people with their hands on the till. The sentence reads like a survival note from that world: watch what someone worships when the room goes quiet. The real target isn’t wealth; it’s smallness disguised as practicality.