also take dictation and copy out his writings. Again he plunged himself
into his work as best he could, beginning on 4 February a political essay
which would become the beginning of his Principes de politique, and
continuing, despite illness and quarrels with Germaine, through March and
April 1806. By 16 April the manuscript was 469 pages long, and Madame
de Staël liked it. Three days later the restless Germaine left for Lyon, tired
of Geneva and Coppet and full of hope that her exile would soon be at an
end, that Napoleon would relent and allow her to return to her beloved
Paris. It was not to be: she was kept at a distance of 40 leagues from the
capital and stayed near Auxerre, at the château of Vincelles, where she
was visited by friends, notably the unfortunate Prosper de Barante, a new
victim of her cataclysmic love, and from whom on 30 March 1806 she had
demanded—and received—a written statement ‘ceding himself entirely’ to
her.^85 Left behind in Geneva, Constant tried to continue his studies but
even without her the social life there was a distraction, and in any case he
found he missed the intellectual stimulus of Germaine. Boredom was
being without her; there was always excitement in her vicinity—and
always a price to pay. The problem lay of course in Constant himself and
in the contradictions of his character: needing peace and quiet for the one
thing that he believed really mattered to him, his writing, yet also craving
the stimulation of company, especially the company of women.
On 1 June 1806 Constant began the journey from Geneva to Auxerre knowing full
well how bad things would be. He would find Germaine discontented, bored, angry with
Barante—who wished to end their affair—and with himself. As he observed in his diary
on 5 June:
All the volcanoes in the world are less fiery [flamboyants] than she
is. What can I do about it? Fighting against her tires me. No more
plans. I shall lie down in my boat and sleep through the gales. No
more working: the fact that I have the talent to is pure chance
anyway, and illness might have destroyed it. I’ll pretend that illness
has destroyed it. [Worked] for the last time in my present
circumstances.^86It was a notion that had a particular appeal for Constant, the idea of being
rocked in the well of a boat, like a child in the womb, sleeping through
storms raging around him, and no doubt called up associations with his
earliest years.^87 But he was an adult and sleep was no longer an option
available to him; he must face the emotional bedlam of la dame de Coppet
and her entourage. He paused at Dole to visit his father who was ill, and
Benjamin constant 192