Benjamin Constant

10 ADOLPHE (1816–1819)

Constant and his wife reached Dover from Ostend on 25 January 1816. By

1 February he had found a suitable house to rent in London, and was

relieved to be generally better received than a recent courtier of Napoleon

had any right to be. To the usual round of dinners, visits to the houses of

friends and acquaintances in and near London, and trips to the theatre,
Constant added public readings in French of his novel, soon to be entitled

Adolphe, to the appreciative audiences of the capital. Perhaps his aim was

to deflect attention from his political past. These readings were

extraordinary affairs, and the several accounts of them that have survived

suggest that they very literally filled the function of Freud’s ‘talking cure’,
that they were some form of dramatic therapy for Constant. Victor de

Broglie, Albertine de Staël’s husband and generally hostile to Constant,

says the following about one such occasion in Paris in his memoirs:

Benjamin gave several readings [of Adolphe] during the Hundred

Days, one of which I was present at in Madame Récamier’s house,

which deserves to be recorded here, since it was not reported at the

time.

There were twelve or fifteen people present. The reading had

been going on for nearly three hours. The novelist was tired; as he

approached the dénouement his feelings were more and more

evident, and fatigue added to his emotion. Finally he could no

longer contain himself; he broke into sobbing; everyone present,

already very moved, began crying as well; soon the room was full

of weeping and moaning; then suddenly, as the result of a

psychological mechanism which is not unusual according to

doctors, his convulsive sobs turned to nervous and irrepressible

laughter, so that if anyone had entered the room at that moment and

chanced upon the writer and his audience they would have been

hard put to know what to think, or to deduce the cause from its

effects.^1

Benjamin constant 230