voluminous manuscript ‘to God’s safekeeping’ (‘à la garde de Dieu’), as
he put it in his diary, that is, to the care of the Reverend Nathaniel May,
his tutor in the early 1780s whom he had not seen for thirty-five years.
May was now a clergyman at Leigh, near Tunbridge Wells in Kent, and
Constant went to visit him there on 22 and 23 July^14 before taking ship to
Ostend with Charlotte on 27 July: his life’s work was too precious to risk
either leaving it in an empty house in London or taking it to France where
there was a reactionary government hostile to him. (He returned to Leigh
on 25 July to give May his preface to the second edition of Adolphe.^15 )
Once in Belgium Constant spent two weeks writing steadily at Spa, then
decided to risk returning to Paris via Brussels. He must now have felt that
he had reached some kind of turning point in his fortunes for he seems
finally to have abandoned keeping a journal altogether on 26 September
1816.^16 From that date onwards we must rely on other sources of
information.
It is always a temptation to divide a writer’s life into neat phases, as Sir Harold
Nicolson did in his lively but occasionally inaccurate Benjamin Constant. For Nicolson,
the years 1816 to 1830 ‘were comparatively sedate’ now that Constant had ‘found at last
the protective tenderness [of Charlotte] for which (without knowing it) he had always
yearned’.^17 It is certainly true that there were to be no more extraordinary public scenes
like the salon readings of Adolphe—and, whether Constant was conscious of the fact or
not, those performances do seem to have enabled him to understand and come to terms at
some deep level with his past behaviour and relationships. But in the rest of his life as in
the preceding years there were to be no tidy divisions between happiness and restlessness,
stability and anxiety. Everything we have seen of Constant’s character would in any case
tend to make the likelihood of any sudden and lasting conversion to a calm acceptance of
his lot extremely remote, and this was indeed the case. He was often bored with Charlotte
and embarrassed by her when in company, and despite his increasing successes in
politics, a glance at the unpublished literary fragments from his later years suggests that
his days and nights were often suffused with melancholy—even more than one might
expect in a man who knew that he had not many years left to live.^18 And to scotch finally
the notion that after Adolphe was published Constant settled down contentedly with
Charlotte, there is the fact that he had at least one more relationship with another woman
during those last fourteen years of his life, a relationship of which Sir Harold Nicolson
had no knowledge.
While in Spa, Constant wrote to his cousin Rosalie to thank her for what she had
written to him about Adolphe. On 14 July 1816 she had written:
You can imagine how Adolphe brought me back close to you again.
It is so completely you that it made me suffer something of what
the actual events had put me through. All my feelings about you
were revitalized, as were my regrets at your failure to achieve
results with the gifts you have been given, and my grief at the painBenjamin constant 234