call an unresolved relationship. Events in Holland, in the form of a mutiny in his father’s
regiment, were shortly to give him an opportunity to prove his loyalty to Juste, just as
those events themselves prove to the objective outside eye what a difficult man Benjamin
Constant had to put up with. The circumstances that led to his father’s court martial and
subsequent unjust treatment were in a sense rehearsed during Constant’s journey to
Switzerland when he spent hours in argument with his travelling companion, a Bernese
aristocrat, took the opportunity to denounce the iniquity of Bernese dominion over his
native Pays de Vaud and threatened to liberate it at the earliest opportunity. These were
close to the views of Juste who was very shortly to feel the full weight of Bernese power
bearing down on him in the aftermath of the mutiny.
Once in Switzerland Constant lost no time in making straight for Neuchâtel and
Isabelle de Charrière’s house nearby at Colombier. During his brief stay there the two
friends resumed the intoxicating conversations and arguments which had been interrupted
by Constant’s English fugue, and proceeded once again to knock intellectual sparks off
each other in a way that neither had experienced before in their lives. The last thing
Constant wished to do in such a frame of mind was return to Lausanne, a dismal and
subdued city in his eyes whose political servitude to Berne he keenly resented. But return
he did, after a couple of days at Colombier, bringing with him a degree of insufferable
conceitedness that was soon to irk his relatives. His aunt Catherine de Charrière de
Sévery whose son Wilhelm and Benjamin were at daggers drawn at the best of times
wrote of Constant:
The protection that Monsieur Gibbon [Edward Gibbon the
historian] gives [to Wilhelm] fills [Benjamin] with the deepest
resentment; all his sparkling wit looked merely pallid; the poor boy
only has his wit, together with the most appalling conceit which
causes him nothing but misery.^27But on this occasion Constant’s time in Lausanne was to be limited. Juste
had been making plans for him ever since they had been in Paris the
previous winter, plans which seem at one point even to have included the
rather unlikely choice of a military career for Constant,
28
but this time they
seemed to offer that degree of independence that Constant now knew to be
the essential component in any future arrangement for his well-being.
Juste had in mind a post at the Court of the Duke of Brunswick, whom he
knew through military service in Holland. The Duke, Karl Wilhelm
Ferdinand (1735–1806), was widely known as an intelligent, enlightened
ruler of his small north-German state and as an ardent francophile. Rather
in the manner of Frederick the Great, the Duke was especially welcoming
to writers and philosophers who passed through his territory, men such as
Goethe and Mirabeau, as he later was to émigrés fleeing revolutionary
France to whom he gave employment at his Court.
29
Juste obtained the
largely ceremonial post of Kammerjunker or Gentleman of the
Benjamin constant 102