oppression of the people of the Pays de Vaud. Juste’s regiment, the Régiment de May (so
called after Friedrich May, its colonel proprietor), was controlled from Berne and
dominated by German-Swiss officers who had a grudge against him. In an affair that
would soon bring together the complexity of Jarndyce versus Jarndyce and the menace of
a Kafka story—and which has been ably summarized recently by C.P.Courtney^17 —Juste
now found himself accused of misconduct on the evidence of condemned mutineers, his
career and entire fortune threatened. A conspiracy on the part of his junior officers led to
his being accused of having been responsible for the Amsterdam mutiny in the first place;
they now refused to serve under Juste any longer. Juste requested that the Conseil de
Guerre national suisse et grison, a high-level military court be convened so that he could
clear his name. It met in Amsterdam between June and August 1788, and from the names
of its judges and its first actions Juste rightly concluded that it was likely to make rulings
against him and in favour of his junior officers. In fact the devastating outcome was that
thirteen sentences were passed not against the officers but against Juste, including six
months suspension and the requirement that he pay the legal costs. Juste was ever a
fighter—one of the more admirable qualities which he passed on to his son—and knew
that he had right on his side. But he was crushed by the weight of injustice and he fled
from Amsterdam in panic in mid-August. For a while the Constant family feared he
might have taken his own life, but he turned up a month later in Lausanne, perhaps
having suffered some form of breakdown. Appearances were not in Juste’s favour: his
flight seemed an admission of guilt, and he could in any case now be charged with
desertion. It was at this point that all the resources of the family were mobilized: Samuel
and Benjamin wrote to the Prince of Orange on 19 September 1788 on Juste’s behalf,^18
and during that autumn Benjamin asked the Duke of Brunswick to intervene with the
Prince of Orange. (The Duke was sympathetic and urged Juste to come and settle in
Brunswick.)^19 Benjamin wrote a memoir of the whole affair, but privately hoped that a
settlement could be reached. Juste, whose argumentative nature made him a natural
litigant, had other ideas and was determined to appeal. When Juste’s petition was
presented in September 1789, his son was in The Hague to support him.
By that time Constant had a wife and had already been married for four months.
During his first lonely and unhappy months in Brunswick he had met a lady-in-waiting to
the Duchess, Wilhelmine Luise Johanne von Cramm (1758–1823), known as ‘Minna’.
The daughter of a former minister at the ducal Court, Carl Gottfried Rudolph von Cramm
(d. 1766), Minna came from a good family and was considered the favourite of the
Duke’s wife. If there is any historical truth in the partly fictional Cécile’s account of the
relationship, Constant married Minna ‘out of weakness’,^20 and, having done so, loved her
out of kindness rather than through feeling any real attraction towards her. What is
certainly true, as Cécile also states, is that they were completely incompatible in
character. On 23 June 1794, surveying the ruins of his son’s marriage, Juste wrote to him:
Always remember who arranged your marriage, remember Deluc
[i.e. the Duke] adopted you as one of his children, that he wrote to
me in order to remove any obstacles there might be and that if he
had not intervened, it is possible that you would not be in the
situation in which you find yourself now. It is therefore up to himBenjamin constant 114