In the same letter he added that while in The Hague he had met Ignazio
Thaon di Revel (1760–1835), Minister to the King of Sardinia, a
Piedmontese whose view of the universe struck a deep chord in him while
in his present state of mind:
He claims that God, that is the Being Who made us and everything
around us, died before He could finish his work, that He had the
finest and most grandiose plans imaginable, and His means to
achieving them were enormous—indeed some of these means were
already in the process of falling into place, just as one puts up
scaffolding before erecting a building—but in the middle of His
work He died, so that everything that is in the universe at present
was created to achieve an end that no longer exists, and we in
particular feel destined for something of which we can have no
conception. We are like watches without dials, in which the cogs
and wheels, which are endowed with intelligence, turn until they
are worn out without knowing why, telling themselves constantly,
‘Since I’m turning, I must be intended for some final purpose’.
This notion strikes me as the wittiest and profoundest piece of
madness I’ve heard, and far preferable to the Christian, Muslim or
philosophical madnesses of the first, sixth and eighteenth centuries
of our era.^38The events of the fateful year of 1789 had passed without making much
impact on Constant, other than to give him some measure of satisfaction,
and the reference above is among the earliest to an event whose
repercussions were to dominate his later political career. Instead he now
he occupied himself with writing an account of the failed uprising in
Brabant against the Austrians, which in the event was to remain unfinished
and unpublished, and planned a Refutation of Burke’s Reflections on the
Revolution in France, a text famously hostile to what was happening in
Paris. That Refutation was never written, but now in his correspondence
began the disobliging spectacle of a series of Refutations of Isabelle de
Charrière in which Baron Constant accused his fellow aristocrat of being
lukewarm in her attitude to the French Revolution, in a manner
unpleasantly close to that of a twentieth-century armchair revolutionary
chiding a comrade for incorrect thinking (he continued nevertheless to
owe Monsieur de Charrière money he had been glad to borrow many
months previously in order to survive heavy gambling debts):
Benjamin constant 136