I was born on 25 October 1767 in Lausanne, Switzerland, the son
of Henriette de Chandieu, who was from a formerly French family
which had taken refuge in the Pays de Vaud for religious reasons,
and Juste Constant de Rebecque, a colonel in a Swiss regiment in
the service of Holland. My mother died as a result of giving birth, a
week [or eight days] after I was born.
[1772] The first tutor of whom I have a reasonably clear
recollection was a German named Stroelin, who used to beat me,
then smother me with his embraces so that I wouldn’t complain to
my father. I always kept my promise to him not to, but what was
going on was found out in spite of my silence, and he was
dismissed. He had had the ingenious notion of getting me to invent
Greek in order to teach it to me, that is to suggest that the two of us
create our own language which only we could understand. I
became enormously keen on the idea. First of all we devised an
alphabet into which he introduced Greek letters. Then we began a
dictionary in which each French word was tranlated by a Greek
one. All of this imprinted itself on my mind to a remarkable degree
because I believed I was the inventor of it all, and I already knew
very many Greek words and was in the process of applying general
rules to what I had made up—that is I was learning Greek
grammar—when my tutor was thrown out of the house. I was 5
when that happened.^11One’s first reaction is astonishment when confronted by that second
paragraph, an astonishment tinged with pity and a degree of disbelief. But
let us go back to the preceding paragraph. Even the editor of the Pléiade
edition of Constant’s Œuvres goes beyond the usual factual annotation and
remarks that there is something rather strange afoot in Benjamin
Constant’s simple statement about his mother and father: ‘It is surprising
that Constant recalls his mother’s Huguenot ancestry without adding that
the Constant de Rebecque family was also a French family that took
refuge in Lausanne as early as the sixteenth century for religious
reasons.’
12
Juste de Constant is deliberately cut out of the glorious heritage
of Protestantism with its tenacity in the Faith, an omission too striking not
to be at some level intended. What might be interpreted as muted
aggression towards his father has to be taken together with the fact that
this is almost the only time in all his writings that Constant mentions his
mother. In later life the offer of a portrait of her by Constant’s half-sister
Louise brought a tart reply from him: he refused to accept it as a gift and
insisted that it should be treated like other portraits and paid for.^13 It is not
Benjamin constant 14