The journey did not get better: an axle on his coach broke at Rastatt,
south-west of Karlsruhe, and while it was being repaired he continued to
reflect bitterly in his next letter to Isabelle:
I had spent three months alone [in Neuchâtel] without seeing bad
temper, avarice or that friendship which ought rather to be called
hatred taking it in turns to torment me. But now, weak in body and
spirit, a slave to my father, my relatives, to rulers, to God knows
who, I am on my way to find a master, enemies, people who will be
jealous of me and what is worse people who will bore me, all this
when I am 250 leagues from home.^2Writing from Darmstadt on 25 February he compared his present lot with
life in England the previous summer, and revealed the real reason for
going to Brunswick:
How my feelings, my hopes and my surroundings have changed!
By dint of seeing men free and happy I thought that I could become
like them: a carefree and solitary summer had given me back some
of my strength. I was no longer worn out by other people’s
moodiness or my own.... If in my weakened state I had left in the
middle of the winter, I would have died 20 leagues from
Colombier. I waited until I could undertake a long journey without
risk to my health, a journey I accepted to make solely out of
obedience and to which, if I had been the heartless son I am
accused of being, I would have objected since I am now 20 years
old. I wanted my father to have at least the shadow of a son whom
he could still love.^3Constant was going against the grain of his own character to carry out his
father’s wishes, trying once again to wring from Juste some sign of
affection and to live up to his father’s sometimes exaggerated expectations
of him—a recurring theme in their relationship, and one which finds its
echo on the first page of Adolphe. However, the young man’s health was
not good: his eyes, already weak and myopic, gave him a lot of trouble,
and he mentions sore throats, stomach upsets, fevers and rashes in his
letters to Isabelle. As a man of the world he knew what to expect from
what he calls ‘la vérole’, ‘the pox’, and from treatment for it, which was
commonly with mercury and had unpleasant side effects. The thought
must have contributed to Constant’s increasingly downcast turn of mind.
The brunswick years 107