who had been proscribed by the First Consul.^48 One might add that one of the children
accompanying them was Albertine, in all probability Constant’s own daughter. And
Germaine’s German, though she had been learning the language since 1799, was not as
fluent as Constant’s.^49
By way of Châlons-sur-Marne and Metz the couple and their retinue made for
Frankfurt, the derision of Bonaparte’s tame Parisian press in their ears. While in Metz
between 26 October and 8 November 1803 Constant and Madame de Staël met Charles
de Villers (1765–1815), a philosopher and important intermediary between German and
French literature and thought, who had lately published an essay in French on the spirit
and influence of Luther’s Reformation.^50 This and Villers’s known enthusiasm for Kant
were recommendation enough, and after being a correspondent of Madame de Staël he
now also became a friend. Constant and Germaine reached Frankfurt on 13 November
- There he attempted to remain incognito as tutor to Germaine’s children while
acquiring German books for the work on religion which he was now resuming.^51 On 3
December they set out again for Weimar, travelling via Fulda and arriving on 14
December. As Constant’s journal entry for 7 December 1804 reveals,^52 what he at first
considered an enormous sacrifice for a woman he no longer loved—abandoning Paris and
his studies at Les Herbages—was to prove an infinitely valuable opportunity to learn
from German writers and philosophers in an atmosphere of intellectual freedom that had
now disappeared in France. Above all it would give a much needed stimulus to his work
on religion. He seems to have planned to leave Germaine after a while and to go to
Geneva to find Charlotte. Nothing of the sort happened: Constant was in his second
homeland once again, surrounded by erudition and unflagging intellectual curiosity, his
morale boosted by the familiar German atmosphere of unprejudiced tolerance and
enlightened liberal attitudes. He found he was in no hurry to leave.
But first Constant went through the curious charade of absenting himself in Gotha
briefly around the New Year in order to drop his incognito and return, as it were,
officially to Weimar on 4 January 1804.^53 Both the flamboyant Germaine de Staël and the
slightly less conspicuous Constant were well received by the Duke and Duchess of Saxe-
Weimar. Germaine wrote to A.Necker de Saussure on 31 January 1804:
[Constant] is invited to the Court twice a day, every day; the
literary people here value him highly. He has a place here because
people have opinions but aren’t partisan in Weimar, and because
the love of literature and of things of the mind are taken extremely
seriously here.^54Then as now the city was small, peaceful and delightful, with its green
meadows by the River Ilm. Under the benign rule of Duke Karl August
(1757–1828) it had become home to some of the greatest figures of
German literature—a literature which had yet to gain due recognition
elsewhere in Europe—and was destined to become the byword for a
golden age in German culture. Constant was fortunate once again, as he
had been in Edinburgh. One piece of bad luck, however, was that Herder,
The intermittences of the heart 183