immediately was each other’s forthright manner and plain-speaking.
Mauvillon was a firebrand, detested for his liberal views by some at Court,
and in a sense already as marginalized as Constant was soon to find
himself to be. There were unsuspected links between them: Constant had
sat next to Mauvillon’s friend Mirabeau at a dinner in Paris the year
before,^14 and in 1791 Mauvillon was to write admiringly about John
Gillies as being ‘one of the greatest experts on Greek antiquity’
15
—
Constant had translated and published a short section of Gillies’s History
of Ancient Greece in 1787, and it is likely that Mauvillon already shared
Constant’s admiration for Gillies and a fascination for his subject. As with
John Wilde, and as with Isabelle de Charrière, a deep understanding
quickly grew between them, though because of the tantalizingly
fragmentary nature of the extant evidence it is difficult to fill in much
detail about their friendship. We can surmise that, given the twenty-four
years difference in their ages, Mauvillon was an ideal father-figure for
Constant, just as Isabelle de Charrière had been a form of surrogate
mother. What recent research seems to have established with some
certainty is that Constant’s political radicalism was reinforced by
Mauvillon, and that Constant’s growing interest in the history of religion
was also encouraged by him. In March 1788 Constant wrote to Isabelle de
Charrière:
What I am writing will be a history of the gradual growth of Greek
civilisation...and a comparison of the customs and beliefs of the
Greeks with those of the Celts, the Germans, the Scots, the
Scandinavians etc.... I will send you half folio sheets in small
handwriting of my Greeks as they stand at the moment; when I’ve
got a little further I shall ask you for sterner criticism of them.^16This study of Greek polytheism was to grow through many
transformations and through several decades into Constant’s books on
Roman polytheism and on religious belief in general published during the
1820s and posthumously.
One commentator, Marcus Fontius, has observed that Constant and Mauvillon must
have made a strange pair, rather like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the one tall and full
of nervous excitement and agitation, the other short, fat and possessed of a calm,
unshakeable self-assurance. Mauvillon was undoubtedly a steadying influence on
Constant, and cheered him up when his spirits were low. Constant was shortly to be in
need of all the consolation he could find. In Holland his father was sliding into an ever
deeper morass of legal difficulties which Constant attributed to the malevolence of ‘the
Bears, our despots’, the Bernese aristocracy whom both father and son hated for their
The brunswick years 113