My financial position will soon be settled: my wife will be richer
than me and I shall leave Marianne [i.e. Marianne Magnin], who
already has much of my money, a little more of what remains. All I
ask is to have enough to live on, to depend on no one, to be tied to
no one.... As for my life here, it’s unbearable and becomes more so
every day. I waste ten hours of the day at a Court where I’m hated
because they know I’m a republican [démocrate], because I’ve
pointed out everybody’s absurdity, which has convinced them I am
a man without principles. I dare say I’m to blame: blasé about
everything, bored with everything, bitter, self-obsessed, with the
kind of sensitivity that only causes me misery, changeable to such
an extent that I simply look foolish, subject to bouts of melancholia
which interrupt all my plans for the future and make me behave,
while they last, as if I had given up on everything; and tormented
into the bargain by outside circumstances, by a father who is both
loving and full of anxiety (and who is at the beck and call of a
Marianne who writes me haughty letters), by a wife who is in love
with a young scatterbrain—platonically, she says—and who claims
still to have some affection for me..., how do you expect me to be
a success, to be liked by anyone, to carry on living?^46And there it was, out in the open: Minna loved someone else, a young
Russian prince, a member of the celebrated Golitsyn family—usually
known in English as Galitzin—in all probability Dmitri Vladimirovich
Golitsyn (1771–1844), a soldier with the counter-revolutionary forces who
also appears to have had a penchant for duelling.
47
Meanwhile Juste, to
whom Constant had by now sacrificed the best part of three years of his
life and possibly his marriage, requested that his son give up over a third
of his inheritance to Marianne Magnin:^48 it marked the beginning of many
years of sometimes public financial wrangling between them during which
Constant may finally have come to see Juste in a more objective light. He
would eventually cease to be the periodically submissive and dominated
son of recent times and reach a greater degree of maturity in this troubled
area of his affective life. While still of course unaware of Marianne’s new
status as Juste’s wife, he could see that he was being replaced in his
father’s affections by a woman whom he repeatedly calls a harpy or a
shrew, and he told Isabelle on 1 January 1793 that he was waiting for a
final answer to the reasonable offer of money he had made to Juste:
If this reply is as I suspect it will be, if it takes the form of an order,
accompanied by bitter reproaches, to make further sacrifices inThe brunswick years 139