Benjamin Constant

‘given’ which is sometimes not questioned until much later life, and this seems to have been the case with Benjamin Constant. Fo ...

references to Marianne, and a sense of being abandoned yet again when Constant learned of—or suspected—the nature of Marianne’s ...

worth which added greatly to the force of her observations. In later life Constant would express his appreciation of his ‘chère ...

precocious intellect. For his part, the solitary boy became more and more attached to this older girl who understood him so well ...

an atheist and libertine, a vain and stupid man who began by trying to seduce the daughter of Benjamin’s music teacher, Ferdinan ...

Benjamin: from a very early age the boy poured forth poems, translations and astonishingly witty and mature letters addressed to ...

freedom, he sometimes came out with strange things which people took to be marks of genius. But as his boisterousness diminishes ...

who had been recommended to Juste, perhaps by Bridges, as a teacher of good character, Nathaniel May (1761–1830), and who was at ...

are of course in English): ‘[Constant] labours very hard and has made great improvement. He is far advanced in the Greek, unders ...

send Benjamin away from home. On 6 February 1782 Benjamin Constant matriculated at the University of Erlangen.^80 The choice of ...

lonely exile. This Margravine was either Friederike Caroline of Saxe-Coburg, the sickly wife of the Margrave who had for long ye ...

Writing some fifty years nearer to Benjamin Constant’s lifetime than Gustave Rudler, and drawing on the personal memories of Con ...

have led him to attach great value to friendship with older men, probably with an element of hero-worship or intellectual compet ...

2 ‘THE CHARMS OF FRIENDSHIP’ (1783–1785) My father only remained in Scotland for three weeks. After he left, I began studying wi ...

common: among other members of Dalzel’s ‘classis provectiorum’ with Scott in December 1784 were Charles Ross, James Johnstone an ...

making progress, but his tastes are widening and it is to be feared that he may give in to them entirely. My sole concern now is ...

outstanding Edinburgh students, Charles Hope^14 and John Wilde. It was through their sponsorship that Constant became a member o ...

first of these, and by far the best known, are the Memoirs of the Life of Sir James Mackintosh, edited from Mackintosh’s manuscr ...

Speculative Society was dedicated, and it provided a channel of expression for that radical Whiggishness which characterized not ...

I have often boasted of your friendship, when your literary and political eminence were my only mode of communicating with you, ...