The London literary hostess, Miss Mary Berry (1763–1852), tells a similar
story in her journal entry for 14 February 1816:
In the evening at the Bourkes where there had been a dinner. Lady
Holland, Princess Lieven etc. and where Benjamin Constant read
his romance or history; I do not know what to call it as he has not
given it a name. It is very well written—a sad and much too true
story of the human heart, but almost ridiculously so with the
company before whom it was read. It lasted two hours and a half.
The end was so touching, that it was scarcely possible to restrain
one’s tears, and the effort I made to do so made me positively ill.
Agnes [her sister] and I both burst into tears on our return home.^2There can be few examples of prepublication performances like this,
comparable in their impact with those of Dickens many years later. What
has too often been overlooked is the effect which Adolphe’s nature as a
performance text seems to have had on its content and structure: subplots
were necessarily excluded, the story was kept short, simple and linear, the
number of characters minimal.
3
The narrating voice of Adolphe was taken
by Constant himself, allowing him to re-experience the distilled emotions
of the past thirty years. In Adolphe were his experiences at Edinburgh and
Brunswick, his friendship with Madame de Charrière and his difficult
relationship with his father, his passion for Madame de Staël, Anna
Lindsay and Charlotte and its inevitable decay; perhaps too an implicit
critique of the values of eighteenth-century society to which the
Napoleonic age had given a new and artificial lease of life.
4
It is hardly
surprising that a work which was both a summary of his life and its
highest achievement should have produced such emotional anguish and
the fou rire, the hysterical laughter that such stress can trigger. But such an
ordeal was clearly very necessary to him, not merely to allow him to
explain publicly his much discussed behaviour, but also to enable him
relive his past in the hope of one day being free of it.
Adolphe, which ironically Constant never valued as highly as his work on religion or
political theory but which now belongs to the canon of great French novels, epitomizes
his mastery of French prose. Its style is clear, direct, elegant and concise, its narrative
intensely felt, its tone plangent but with no trace of the mawkish sentimentality which the
accounts of its performance might suggest. The many memorable aphorisms which
emerge naturally in Adolphe’s account of his sudden passion for Ellénore and his
inability to end their relationship when that love has died bear comparison with the
moralistes of seventeenth-century France. And the exceptionally complex account which
Adolphe gives of his changing emotions within the space of the mere hundred or so pages
Adolphe 231