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‘THE GRIEF THAT DOES NOT
SPEAK’: CONSTANT AND HIS
FATHER (1767–1783)
Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak
Whispers the o’er-fraught heart, and bids it break.
(Macbeth,IV. iii)It was a calamitous beginning. Scarcely was Benjamin Constant born, on
25 October 1767, a frail baby who was not expected to live, than the
attention and anxieties of his family were directed away from him to his
25-year-old mother, Henriette, neé de Chandieu. There may have been
complications at the birth; we do not know. What is certain is that
Benjamin Constant’s mother died on the sixteenth day after his birth, that
is on 10 November 1767, no doubt after unimaginable suffering.
1
Benjamin immediately became the focus of a quarrel between his two
grandmothers as to who should have charge of him. The argument was
won by Henriette’s mother, Françoise-Marie-Charlotte, neé de Montrond
(1722–77), but the tensions which already existed between the Constant
and Chandieu families were aggravated: as Constant grew older they were
indeed to become chronic.
2
Benjamin was baptized on 11 November at the
Calvinist church of Saint-François in Lausanne, and the following day
Henriette de Constant was buried in the Saint-François cemetery. Shortly
before the funeral, her husband Juste, desperate at the loss of the woman
he had married only the previous year, was stricken with a seizure: he was
unable to move, he could not get his breath, his pulse apparently stopped,
and he was only saved by the intervention of a doctor.
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A second tragedy
was thus narrowly averted. Colonel Juste de Constant lived on to return to
Holland and the Swiss regiment of which he was commanding officer
there. Meanwhile his son was no doubt left in the care of a nurse or nanny
about whom we know nothing, whom Benjamin Constant never mentions
and who concerned herself with the mundane task of keeping him alive.
The grief that does not speak 9