were pulped. All traceable copies of the book in circulation were seized and destroyed.^55
Madame de Staël, having saved the publisher Nicolle from bankruptcy by returning his
advance of 13,000 francs, had left for Coppet on 6 October, where in December she
learned of another example of the Emperor’s spitefulness: Prosper de Barante, Constant’s
friend and her lover, was stripped of his post as Prefect of Napoléon-Vendeé because of
his association with Germaine.^56 On her way to Coppet and exile, Madame de Staël had
met Constant and Charlotte on 10 October at Briare. Three days later, probably in some
emotional disarray, Constant lost 20,000 francs in one furious evening’s gambling in
Paris, and was forced to sell Les Herbages, his furniture and part of his library to pay his
debts.^57 He no longer had any reason or desire to remain in France where it was now the
reign of Caligula: the Emperor might at any moment pick on him and for his own
amusement make him the victim of another piece of gratuitous unpleasantness, such as
conscripting him into the Garde Nationale or the Garde Sédentaire. On 17 January 1811
Constant left with Charlotte for Lausanne, where further difficulties awaited him. No
doubt put up to it by Germaine de Staël, the increasingly senile Juste wished to take his
son to court in Geneva over their long-running financial dispute. And the reception
accorded to Constant and his wife by polite society in Lausanne was to be good or bad
depending on the host’s feelings towards Madame de Staël: as Constant had always
feared, Germaine’s influence was proving to be both extensive and rather effective in
making life disagreeable for him. During February and March 1811 his time was largely
taken up with trying to reach some agreement with his father over money. On 20 April
1811 they succeeded in patching up their differences and signed a private treaty in
Geneva,^58 though things had deteriorated between them to such an extent that in January
1812 Juste was to take the extraordinary step of having an account of their financial
dealings with each other printed—with his own critical observations—to circulate to
other members of the family. Juste’s self-righteousness and stubborn tenacity were
unchanged since the days of his court martial, and even though he ratified the treaty on
28 April 1811, some weeks later he found it unsatisfactory and unacceptable.
It is no wonder that Constant’s Ma Vie—also known by the more romantic but bogus
title of Le Cahier rouge, from the red notebook it is written in^59 —which was composed in
all probability in the same year, possibly during the summer of 1811, reads like an
indictment of Juste for his incompetence as a father. Ma Vie is an irresistibly comic,
picaresque and sometimes bitter-sweet account of Constant’s life from his birth in 1767
up to the quarrel with François du Plessis-Gouret in November 1787. The narrator in
middle age sympathizes with the scatterbrained young man he once was but maintains an
ironic distance from his follies. The underlying theme which that ironic tone disguises is
the young Benjamin’s complete dependence on his father and Juste’s inability either to
choose good tutors for him or, more important, to communicate face to face with his son
or show him the affection he genuinely felt. Ma Vie may have been begun as early as
1793 during the first phase of his relationship with Charlotte,^60 but the single unfinished
manuscript of it which has survived dates from this later period of conflict with Juste, and
had to wait until 1907 for publication. It is a matter for regret that, as with Cécile, there is
no readily available English translation of a work which throws valuable light on
Adolphe, particularly on the father-son relationship portrayed there.
Madame de Staël was at Coppet that spring of 1811 under the watchful eye of
Napoleon’s new, zealous and thoroughly unscrupulous Prefect of the Lake of Geneva
Italiam 209