‘Open discussion’: the contrast with Rousseau and his father is instructive.
That passage of the Confessions about a bereaved husband’s anger, sorrow
and resentment must have been alarming and depressing for Constant
when he eventually came to read it. There was no such communication
with Juste de Constant. There was love of a kind, of course, in Juste, as
Constant later knew, but a love which, very early, became ambitiousness
on Benjamin’s behalf and a desire to rush him into an ‘adult’ world of
intellectual achievement. No tears, no tender feelings, no mothering:
Benjamin was under pressure to become a bel esprit, an intellectual and a
salon wit—and the sooner the better. What damage Juste did to his son by
this and other manifestations of a crass disregard for ordinary common
sense we shall see later in this book. But we are still at the beginning of
the story and that harm was, by the age of 5, already beginning to show
itself in Benjamin Constant.
Evidence about Constant’s early childhood is extremely scant and fills only a dozen
pages out of the seven hundred which make up volume I of the comprehensive
Chronologie de la vie et de l’œuvre de Benjamin Constant, edited by Dominique Verrey
in collaboration with Etienne Hofmann, covering the years 1767–1805.^10 It was not until
1810 or 1811 that Constant himself began setting down his early experiences in a
systematic and non-fictional form, though there may have been earlier unrecorded
attempts. This precious but unfinished account of the years 1767–87 was given the title
Le Cahier rouge in 1907 by its first editor after the red cover of the notebook, but
Constant’s title was Ma Vie—My Life—as can be seen from the first page. On 2 February
1812 Juste de Constant died, and subsequently Benjamin seems to have revised the text
of Ma Vie, to what extent is unknown. At all events it was neither completed nor
published by him and the narrative ends in November 1787, just before Constant’s
reunion with his friend Isabelle de Charrière. Where Rousseau’s Confessions sustain an
unbroken flow of events and commentary, stretching back before his birth and reaching
the moment when Rousseau sets pen to paper, Ma Vie in its early sections is marked by
curious gaps and silences. As Constant’s account moves away from childhood towards
late adolescence the writing leaves behind the initial form of brief entries year by year as
in a chronicle and begins to resemble a continuous story. When he began writing,
Constant may not have intended so detailed a record, with the dialogue, description and
reflection that we see in the later sections of Ma Vie, and this might explain the lopsided
nature of the whole. One might suppose that after a jerky and uncertain beginning,
Constant with practice got into his stride and by the time he reached the mid–1780s was
writing with confidence. But is this really the case? I suspect not. Nor was it the case, I
believe, that Constant considered accounts of childhood experiences to be lacking in
interest: Rousseau had shown they could make absorbing reading. I would suggest rather
that a return to the details of his childhood would have been a return to an infernal region,
to a time of unrelieved emotional suffering for Constant that he could hardly bear to
recall. And the evidence of the text seems to bear this out. Ma Vie begins thus:
The grief that does not speak 13