Condorcet’s with Benjamin Constant, Madame Talma and General Laclos who told us
how he had written his novel—which he seems very pleased with.’^27 It was not the first
time that Constant had heard Laclos on the subject: he had met him in Paris during the
1780s, and in one of Constant’s funniest letters to Isabelle de Charrière, that of 9–14
March 1788, he recounts a conversation with a Belgian from Brussels, François-Louis-
Charles Boutmy (1739–1817), Professor of French Language and Literature at the
Collegium Carolinum, a technically orientated university in Brunswick where Jakob
Mauvillon also taught.^28 Hopelessly confused but very stubborn, Boutmy had insisted
that Les Liaisons dangereuses was the work of a ‘Monsieur Constant d’Avranches’—that
is Constant d’Hermenches, Benjamin Constant’s late uncle—to which Constant had
replied, ‘But Monsieur, I have had dinner with Monsieur de Laclos’ and everyone in
Paris knew that he had written the book. Neither of these meetings is recorded by
Laclos’s most recent biographer Georges Poisson.^29 Whether Laclos and his great novel
were later a stimulus to Constant in his own writing is open to conjecture. Certainly
Adolphe sets out to be a seducer in the mould of a Valmont, and then discovers too late
that his finer feelings prevent him from abandoning Ellénore: the real story of Adolphe
begins, in a sense, where Les Liaisons dangereuses leaves off.^30 Sadly Laclos was soon to
meet a very unpleasant death while on military service in the heat of southern Italy. He
died of exhaustion, dysentery and malaria at Taranto the following summer.
In March 1802 the Treaty of Amiens was signed, bringing a temporary peace to
Europe: on 1 April there were English guests at Madame de Staël’s dinner table.^31 From
time to time Constant and Anna Lindsay met each other and corresponded, in spite of all
that had happened. Constant read Chateaubriand’s five-volume Génie du christianisme
(The Genius of Christianity) (1802) and disliked its imprecise Romantic style and
sentimentality intensely.^32 Its subject matter continued to interest him, however, and even
in the midst of work on his political treatise, Constant’s long and unfinished book on the
history of religion was never entirely forgotten. He was depressed and discontented when
he arrived in Switzerland in mid-May 1802 to visit relatives: General Bonaparte was
seeking election as Consul for life and France was moving inexorably from military
dictatorship to Empire. Under Bonaparte’s bullying personal rule censorship and
surveillance were flourishing, the press had become routinely sycophantic—advancement
now being dependent on flattering the régime—and war was everywhere glorified. (The
parallels with twentieth-century dictatorships are striking, though Bonaparte’s was of
course mild and amateur by our standards.) There was little Constant or liberal-minded
friends could do but become, like dissidents in Soviet Russia, ‘internal exiles’, members
of the intellectual maquis. And that is precisely what Madame de Staël’s Coppet was to
symbolize in the years to come: a focus not just of French but of European resistance to
the Emperor’s warmongering and to his authoritarian rule.
The sense of an impending real exile cannot have been far from Constant’s mind
during his summer in Switzerland. Germaine’s active political intriguing added to the risk
that his return to France might be unwelcome to the régime. Hard work on his political
treatise and considerable background reading made his thoughts turn to travel during the
coming winter, perhaps to Scotland or Germany, both countries being inextricably
associated in his mind with study.^33 In the meantime he filled his letters to Anne de
Nassau that August with satirical—and prophetic—wit concerning Bonaparte’s supposed
claims to North Africa,^34 and was warm in support of a new book by Germaine de Staël’s
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