Benjamin Constant

moral ideas that it could have separated from them, but also

mocking its own principles, taking pleasure in sparing nothing from

ridicule, in degrading and cheapening everything! When you read

the works of that period carefully, you are surprised neither at what

came after nor its consequences today [i.e. Napoleon]. They were

men who lived for the moment, limiting their existence and

influence to that moment, writing only to encourage the next

generation in selfishness and degradation, a generation which has

certainly profited from their lessons.^71

His critique of Napoleon’s age for its systematized baseness, its rapacity,
selfishness and indifference to suffering was taking shape and had a

historical and philosophical foundation. On religion he was to write in his

journal on 19 February 1805:

There is something coarse and blasé in irreligiousness which I find

repellent. And besides there is a part of me that is religious. But

that religion is entirely a matter of feelings, of vague emotions. It

cannot be reduced to a system.^72

Worries and distractions now crowded in upon Constant. His father and

Marianne were in continual and serious dispute with him about the money

that would be needed to bring up his half-brother and half-sister. Constant
commented on this marriage and its consequences: ‘Strange man, who

never considered the wrong he was doing to me, even as regards my

feelings, or to himself.’
73
It is a remark that sums up their unhappy

relationship, and shows how far Constant had advanced in his

understanding of it since defending him in Holland in the early 1790s. But
more unsettling still was Germaine de Staël’s imminent departure:

separations usually filled Constant with anguish, and for days beforehand

he was upset by this one. He left for Paris on 26 November 1804, spending

a few days at Dole with his father on the way, and then a few more in

Lyon with Madame de Staël (6–12 December 1804). Then she left on 11
December for Turin, and Constant reached Les Herbages on 21 December.

In Paris he saw Claude Fauriel, the historian Claude Hochet (1773–

1857. 74
      and other friends, but was profoundly disappointed by the

superficiality of French people’s attitudes when he described his book on

religion, and now found the obligatory socializing and late nights
exhausting. He saw Anna Lindsay, who still loved him, but had still to

meet Charlotte. He noted on 28 December 1804 in his diary: ‘I hope to see

Benjamin constant 188