Benjamin Constant

favour of a harpy I’m not even related to [harpie inconnue], I shall

make them. But then...I shall let this harpy replace me alongside

my father. I shall pass over to her the task of ensuring his happiness

which he does not want me to perform, and I shall think only about

my own well-being.^49

Constant now saw there was no future in his marriage, and during

November 1792 found consolation in a sexual relationship with an actress

named Caroline about whom he was later to express himself in
uncharacteristically lyrical terms to Isabelle de Charrière:^50 she gave him

the kind of intense and heady emotional experience that he had not known

in years, comparable perhaps with what he had found with Madame

Johannot or would later rediscover with Anna Lindsay. Whether

Constant’s infidelity preceded that of Minna with Prince Golitsyn is
unclear, although he expressed no guilt to Isabelle de Charrière about the

liaison. What seems certain is that Minna and her friends were making life

as difficult as possible for Constant even in his own home. In a vivid

manuscript account of the collapse of his marriage known as the Narré,

and written in the space of a couple of hours on 25 March 1793 with the
aim of offering an objective record of what had happened, he stated:

Thus my life was spent, in scene after scene [with Minna], not

knowing how to end her relationship [with Golitsyn] which I had

been foolish enough not to nip in the bud, a stranger in my own

home, misjudged by those around me, always too weak to cause a

public stir, telling myself it was too late and trying to keep my

mind off my painful situation. It was precisely that reluctance to

dwell on my predicament that came to be misrepresented by others

as culpable tolerance and treachery towards my wife.^51

Constant had lately learnt much about the art of forensic self-defence from

the many documents he had written for and with his father, and it is not

without significance that the three works of fiction or fictionalized
autobiography for which he is best known today, Adolphe, Cécile and Ma

Vie (Le Cahier rouge), involve in varying degrees self-justification and the

indictment of others. The Narré—which is careful to mention nothing

about Constant’s own dalliance with the actress Caroline—offers a

gripping picture of the intrigue and perfidy at the Court of Brunswick of
which he emerges as the feckless but generally innocent victim. From

certain parallels of detail and verbal similarities it appears likely that the

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