love for you and for life will be reborn. My reputation will be
strengthened, I shall no longer have a serpent gnawing away at me,
and I shall be the most cheerful and best of Ouffys.
My best wishes to your son. I am, believe me, your
Ouffy.^28The letter, from the Von Marenholtz papers in Wolfenbüttel, is more
intimately revealing than any other of the state of Constant’s marriage in
his later years. By 1829 his gambling debts to the banker and liberal
Jacques Lafitte (1767–1844) would total 102,580.75 francs,^29 though
Lafitte was always shrewd enough to allow almost limitless credit to a
politician who might one day hold high office. Charlotte had more than
enough income for both herself and Constant, despite the money she had
given Du Tertre, but he felt embarrassed at asking her to keep him—no
doubt in view of his foolishness in continuing to gamble. But he also knew
that she would never accept the idea of their living apart. As for their
emotional rapport, Constant appears to have settled into an affectionate if
somewhat condescending relationship with Charlotte, and long before this
date had adopted with her the nickname ‘Ouffy’ which may possibly in
some way have been linked to the name ‘Adolphe’.
The Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth (1767–1849) has left us a memorably unflattering
description of the older Constant in a letter she wrote from France to a cousin in July
1820:
I do not like him at all. His countenance, voice, manner and
conversation are all disagreeable to me. He is a fair whithky-
looking [sic] man, very near-sighted with spectacles which seem to
pinch his nose. He pokes out his chin to keep the spectacles on, and
yet looks over the top of his spectacles, squinching up his eyes so
that you cannot see your way into his mind. Then he speaks
through his nose, and with a lisp, strangely contrasting with the
vehemence of his emphasis. He does not give me any confidence in
the sincerity of his patriotism, nor any idea of his talents, though he
seems to have a mighty high idea of them himself. He has been
well called le héro[s] des brochures. We sat beside each other and
I think felt a mutual antipathy.^30Of course if Maria Edgeworth had known the tribulations that Constant’s
eyes had caused him since adolescence, she might perhaps have been a
little less censorious. Another witness, Thureau-Dangin, in his study of
Apotheosis 249