had known for many years) at Wadenhoe near Oundle, in Northamptonshire. Bridges was
also Rector of Orlingbury, in the vicinity of which was Great Harrowden Hall where
lived Lady Charlotte Watson-Wentworth, sister of Charles, Marquess of Rockingham.
Bridges took Constant to meet her, and the young man was in awe of this ageing
aristocrat so closely connected with a Whig administration that had been idolized by
himself and his friends in Edinburgh.^22 But now at length reality was closing in once
again on Constant—one might indeed say that the anaesthetic was wearing off and the
pain beginning to return. For the fact was that summer was ending and he could no longer
put off returning to Holland to face a verbal lashing from his father. As he rode south-east
in the direction of Kimbolton, the Great North Road and London on the morning of 11
September 1787, he doubtless wondered if he would ever again taste the exhilarating
sense of liberty his English escapade had brought him. Both Ma Vie and his letters to
Isabelle de Charrière emphasize that one central experience: being alone and free at last.
Britain was to remain for him not merely a model of political freedom, but a remembered
haven of personal happiness.
On money borrowed from Nathaniel Bridges Constant reached the capital where,
according to Ma Vie, he appears to have received letters from his father expressing
despair at his behaviour, and informing him that his bankers Ripley, Rivier & Co. in the
City had been forbidden to give him any more money.^23 When this indeed proved to be
the case, he made once again for his erstwhile Edinburgh drinking companion, the
ambitious Yorkshire doctor Richard Kentish, whom he had left in Brighton two months
previously. At his Gower Street house Kentish received him somewhat coolly, as wary of
Constant’s capacity for deception as Juste’s bankers now were. Constant’s request for
money was met with an offer of 10 guineas in return for a bill of exchange. It was the
kind of humiliation Constant was unlikely to forgive, especially since he had so recently
been feted in Scotland by John Wilde and James Mackintosh. After riding to Dover he
sent Kentish the dog that had accompanied him on his journey around Britain with a note
saying that since Kentish treated his friends like dogs he hoped that he would treat the
dog like a friend.^24
In Calais Constant pawned a watch and rode night and day via Bruges and Antwerp,
where he borrowed more money from an innkeeper, towards ‘s-Hertogenbosch, more
widely known at this period as Bois-le-Duc, the Dutch town where his father was
stationed. All the time dread of his father’s scolding was increasing in him. But the
account of his arrival which Constant gives in Ma Vie bears eloquent testimony to the
extreme oddity of Juste:
I was in a state of the most terrible anguish, and for a while I did
not have the strength to ask to be taken to my father’s lodgings.
Nevertheless I was obliged to take my courage in both hands and
go there. As I walked behind the guide I had been given, I trembled
both at the thought of the just reproaches that could be made
against me, and at the idea of finding my father hurt and perhaps ill
because he had been so deeply wounded by me. His most recent
letters had upset me greatly. He had written to say that he was ill
because of the pain I had caused him, and that if I stayed away anyBenjamin constant 100