homeland, I felt inclined this morning to tease you about your
notion.... Will you tell me why the man who writes with a kind of
melancholy about the distance between himself and happiness
seems to be afraid of getting nearer to it? Why has he exiled
himself from it voluntarily? Why is he so sad? Why when he
remembers the homeland he loved does he feel its charms? ...You
also say that my letters are like waves breaking at your feet. Oh, let
me get nearer to your heart, I beg of you, and sacrifice to me your
philosophy of indifference! Cross quickly that gulf which you are
staring at, come to me when I give the sign.^34More than once ‘Eliane’ mentions Adolphe and understandably does not
wish to share the fate of Ellénore. She appears to have met Constant at a
masked ball in 1818, and at first does all she can to maintain the air of
mystery surrounding herself. A rendezvous is eventually arranged; it
seems that there is an affair; and the correspondence ends with a note of
sadness entering ‘Eliane’s’ letters.
Thus, despite making his mark in French politics, there is evidence that during 1818
Constant was often gloomy and nostalgic for past times, particularly no doubt for the
scholarly life of Germany, with which his course of lectures on religion at the Athénée
royal in February was a tangible link. He continued to defend his political beliefs,
publishing in March the second volume of his collected essays on representative
government.^35 Then, on 25 June during a visit to his friend, the banker Baron Davilliers,
Constant fell—reportedly while jumping in Davilliers’s garden to show he was still
physically agile—and permanently injured a leg.^36 The next two months were spent
gradually recovering from the accident, and despite medical treatment he thereafter
walked with the aid of a stick, and later of crutches. (‘Eliane’ begins her correspondence
on 26 August [1818] by expressing her concern about his health since his ‘cruel
accident’.) Despite this handicap he stood for election as an Independent deputy in the
Seine department, where he encountered unfair interference in the electoral process by
the government which supported its own candidate.^37 As if that were not already
sufficiently dispiriting, there was factional squabbling among his liberal political allies,
and the Friends of Press Freedom were also opposed to his candidature, thinking him
more useful outside the Chamber. When yet again Constant failed to be elected in
October 1818—in spite of his articles in the Minerve revealing the machinations of his
enemies^38 —he was understandably bitter. This time, however, though he did not know it,
success was not very far off.
In November 1818 Constant was written to by Charles-Louis-François Goyet (1770–
1833), a lawyer in Le Mans with his own newspaper, a political activist and leader of
liberals in the Département de La Sarthe, the area around Le Mans. Goyet invited
Constant to stand as a liberal candidate at the forthcoming by-election in the Sarthe.^39
Constant naturally seized the opportunity with both hands, especially since, through
Goyet’s powerful influence in the region, his friend General Lafayette had already been
elected a deputy in the Sarthe. He wrote immediately to his cousin Charles in Geneva for
Adolphe 239