pamphlets to defend his position. Although he was defeated, he now at last
had friends and allies, and a precise cause to struggle for.
From that autumn of 1817 books, articles and pamphlets began to flow from his pen in
numbers that are scarcely believable. As the government fought back with repressive
measures, so Constant’s natural zeal in pursuit of liberty drove him on to ever greater
activity. In November he and others formed the Society of Friends of Press Freedom
(Société des Amis de la Liberté de la Presse) in solidarity with an imprisoned publisher:
as a result of police harassment the Society would be dissolved on 18 December 1819.^29
Then in December 1817 Constant took up the cause of one Wilfrid Regnault whom he
believed to have been unjustly condemned to death for murder on flimsy evidence.
Thanks to open letters in 1818 to the Court of Appeal, Regnault’s sentence was reduced
to twenty years imprisonment—a triumph for Constant who was now following in the
campaigning and humanitarian footsteps of Voltaire defending the Chevalier de la Barre
or clearing the name of the innocent Calas. As a consequence he rose considerably in the
public’s esteem.^30 The year was rounded off with the closure by the government of the
Mercure de France by order of the Minister of Police: Richelieu had been enraged by an
article which had appeared in it concerning the Concordat. Almost immediately the
Mercure was to be replaced by a new newspaper, La Minerve française, launched in
February 1818 by a group of liberal journalists including Constant. Nor was Constant’s
work on religion forgotten: from November 1817 he began planning a course on the
history of religions at the Athénée royal—the successor to La Harpe’s Lycée, a hall
where by payment of a subscription the public could attend open lectures. The first
lecture took place on 6 February 1818.^31 It is possible that in the audience was an admirer
whose name we do not know, a woman who used the pseudonym of ‘Eliane’, and who
was about to disturb the calmer rhythm of his life.
Among the papers of the Von Marenholtz family kept in the archives of Lower
Saxony, in the Niedersächsisches Staatsarchiv in Wolfenbüttel near Brunswick, is a
remarkable series of unpublished letters addressed to Constant from August 1818 to
February 1819 and running to 172 pages in all.^32 The letters are not originals but copies
made in a careful secretarial hand, perhaps on the instructions of Charlotte, who had
always taken a generous and selfless interest in the other women who, like herself, had
loved Constant over the years.^33 One letter is signed ‘Eliane’, and from the letters’
contents it seems that this unknown admirer, now living in Paris, is older than Constant
and knew him many years before, perhaps in Germany. Her French style at times
suggests that she may have been German, some such figure, perhaps, as Sophie von
Schardt (1755–1819) with whom Constant may have had a brief liaison in Weimar in
1804, or even an acquaintance from Brunswick or Erlangen thirty or more years before.
Her manner is that of a confident emancipated woman, forthright, often witty and teasing:
she numbers her letters, and Constant is required to send his replies via a Polish woman
of their acquaintance. Although we do not possess Constant’s replies, we gain glimpses
of the relationship, and of Constant’s feelings of despair at this time—he was 51 in
October 1818 and beginning to show signs of physical frailty. ‘Eliane’ writes, for
example:
Despite my sadness at reading your letter in which you liken
yourself to a man sitting by the sea which separates him from hisBenjamin constant 238