Benjamin Constant

independence. I need to remember the advantages of my ties [with

Germaine] as well as their disadvantages. But that Anna is a

distinguished woman, with great nobility of character and sound

judgement. She is unsubtle, however, and rather narrow, and the

prejudices that she has adopted with the highest of intentions all

run counter to her own self-interest. There is a fieriness, a violence

and a meticulousness in the way she runs her house that make her a

veritable domestic demon. She is probably the woman who has

loved me the most, and who has made me the most unhappy. But I

owe to her everything I know about the ecstasy of physical and

emotional love in a woman.^68

The passage is echoed in the well-known description of Ellénore at the

beginning of Adolphe.
He spent August 1804 in Geneva with Germaine, dictating chapters to his copyist and
trying to put some order into a book that frequently threatened to overwhelm him with its
multiple drafts and numerous sections, his study of religion. Planning to leave as soon as
possible himself for Germany, he marked time until Madame de Staël left for Italy. On 21
August he described himself under Germaine’s domination as ‘a shade, conversing with
other shades, but no longer able to make plans for the future’^69 —‘shade’ (ombre) was a
fashionable word and concept at this time—and in similar mood, while watching his
2,000 books being packed for despatch to Les Herbages, remarked in his diary on 22
October:

This library...which because of all its travels has cost me more

than it’s worth, especially since half of the books are worn through

having been moved about so much without even having had their

pages cut, this library really is emblematic of the existence of a

man who has never known what he wanted to do with his life.^70

In France Pope Pius VII was about to crown Napoleon emperor;

repression had become generalized and any political activity was out of
the question. Scholarship appeared to be the only worthwhile pursuit left

open to Constant, and, seeing so many apparently wasted years behind

him, he was understandably desperate to make his mark through it. His

attitude to religion had gradually changed and he now felt himself at a

considerable distance from his earlier self and the age in which he had
grown up:

What a strange philosophy, in truth, was that of the eighteenth

century, poking fun at itself and other philosophies, setting out to

discredit not only received prejudices, not only the consoling or

The intermittences of the heart 187