Bedchamber for his son during the autumn of 1787, an appointment which
was confirmed on 8 March 1788 (and indeed was later followed by
promotion to the rank of Legationsrat or Councillor on 27 December
1788). Benjamin was to prepare to leave for Brunswick during December
- It was a prospect which, on the face of it, offered everything the
young man could want: intelligent company, a large measure of freedom
and leisure, the protection of the Duke, financial security and the
minimum amount of work.
For a man as complex as Constant, however, it could all go wrong, and indeed the
seeds of potential disaster were already germinating. During October or November 1787
Catherine de Charrière de Sévery wrote to her son Wilhelm:
Yesterday Monsieur de Sévery was at Bellevue [his country house
north-east of Lausanne] where Benjamin was haranguing the
people with vanity, self-importance and overweening presumption,
interrupting everyone, condemning the magistrature of Lausanne,
criticizing and issuing plans for a new government; in a word he is
like his father, the difference between them being that unlike him
he is not polite and is infinitely less likeable. The Hubers like him
[the family of the painter Jean Huber] because they are taken in by
his manner.^30Constant’s response to political repression was as fierce as to any
infringement of his own personal freedom, and it had already made him a
démocrate, an opponent of monarchs and churchmen. It would make him
a natural supporter of the French Revolution when it came. He was about
to leave for the Court of Duke Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, the man who was
soon to lead the armies of the European alliance against revolutionary
France.
Before joining Constant on his epic winter coach journey along the muddy rutted
roads of eighteenth-century Germany, we must not neglect other indications of difficult
times ahead for him. The most serious occurred on 29 October 1787 in Amsterdam: the
first battalion of Juste’s Swiss garrison mutinied. Despite his fellow officers’ deserting
him, he managed to quell the mutiny, but became involved in a long series of military
court cases which would ruin him financially and preoccupy his son for several years.^31
The next is the tragicomic affair of Constant’s duel with François du Plessis-Gouret
(1755–1833), a lieutenant in a Swiss regiment: on the way to pay a final visit to Madame
de Charrière on 18 November 1787 before leaving for Brunswick he got into an argument
over his dog with a landowner near Ependes. Constant’s hot temper, family pride, and a
taste for duelling which was already in evidence at Erlangen, turned the disagreement
into an affair of honour. Over the next few days the duel was postponed, and Constant
wrote a comic poem on the Du Plessis family and the duel manqué. He stayed in
Escape 103