obstinacy: ‘I had begun going down that path and nothing was going to
make me leave it.’
4
Meanwhile Constant had taken Jenny’s mother further into his confidence, so that
Madame Pourrat’s lover, Louis-Claude Bigot de Sainte-Croix (1744–1803), had become
violently jealous of Constant’s friendship with his mistress—who was in her fifties. One
day, in order to reassure Sainte-Croix, Madame Pourrat arranged for her lover to meet
Constant at her house, and in front of him asked Constant to state that it was Jenny, not
herself, who was the object of his yearning. Constant misunderstood completely what the
situation required of him, and took her question as an unparalleled affront to his pride: he
was expected to admit to a complete stranger that he had failed to arouse the slightest
interest in either mother or daughter (which was, of course, the case, at least where
Madame Pourrat was concerned). On an impulse he took from his pocket a phial of
opium, began saying that he was going to kill himself ‘and by dint of saying it I almost
succeeded in believing it, even though I hadn’t the slightest wish to go through with it’.^5
Partly through self-induced hysteria, partly in the ill-judged hope that such a display
would win Jenny’s heart, he put the phial to his lips and swallowed some of the liquid.
Characteristically, he was also partly serious in his intention to seek a way out of his
difficulties: ‘given my dilemma I was completely indifferent to the outcome’. Yet equally
typical was his suddenly becoming bored with the solemnity of the whole proceedings, a
parallel perhaps with his tendency in later life to punctuate moments of great pathos in
his readings of Adolphe with a fou rire.^6 And it was his submitting to receiving
medication that destroyed the effect of his grand suicidal gesture. The next day Madame
Pourrat wrote to tell him that his plans to elope with Jenny no longer made him
acceptable in her house, and she called in Monsieur de Charrière as honest broker in the
matter. He interviewed Jenny and reported back to Constant that she had no love for him
and was quite happy to marry the man it was intended that she should marry all along, all
of which came as no surprise to the erstwhile suicide who had already recovered from the
incident. As with Mrs Trevor the major factor in the episode had been ‘l’irritation de
l’obstacle’, chafing against an insurmountable obstacle. But just as decisive had been ‘the
fear of being obliged to rejoin my father [which] had made me persevere in a desperate
venture’,^7 and it was either reports of a fresh outbreak of gambling fever in Benjamin or
news of the fiasco at Madame Pourrat’s that led his father to send a Lieutenant Sigismond
Benay from his regiment to bring the prodigal back before his presence in Holland. Were
it not for a chance delay in their departure, and for the effect Isabelle de Charrière’s
friendship was already having on him, there is little doubt that Constant would have gone
back to ’s-Hertogenbosch with Lieutenant Benay. There, once Juste had got over his
anger, he would have left Benjamin to his own devices, with little money and no friends:
such, as we have seen, was the usual extent of Juste de Constant’s paternal solicitude—
scalding sarcasm, followed by condescension or indifference. It was neglect of an
unendurable kind, and Benjamin now no longer found the strength in himself to endure it.
He gave Benay the slip, and with only a clean shirt and 31 louis in his pocket, he made
for the English Channel by coach. Within a day he was in Calais, within two he had
caught the Dover packet, and on 26 June 1787 he was on the road to London.^8
Open defiance of one’s parents is hardly unusual behaviour in a 19-year-old, but in a
young man as father-dominated as Benjamin Constant it signalled a sharp change of
direction. It was to coincide also, significantly, with his first serious attempt at novel-
Escape 91