Benjamin Constant

Thank you for approving of my book. I am hard at work on the

second volume which is more shocking than the first. It’s

impossible to foresee or calculate today what it will be permissible

to print or say, but I must work on in the meantime.^32

Then serious illness struck, and during the last three months of 1824

Constant, perhaps for the first time, came to the realization that he

probably did not have long to live. The nature of that illness, possibly the

result of a seizure or minor stroke, is not clear, and it has been suggested
by one modern medical commentator, Dr Michel Folman, that Constant,

like so many of his contemporaries, could have been suffering from the

later stages of syphilis, of which the failure of his leg injury to heal was a

possible sign.
33
In the absence of other evidence there can, of course, be

no certainty about this. Constant wrote to Rosalie on 9 December 1824:

I see from your letter, my dear Rosalie, that Constance did not tell

you that I was ill when she left Paris. She probably didn’t consider

my illness serious. But it was, and probably still is. This is the sixth

week that I’ve been unable to leave my bedroom. Everyone,

including my doctor, says I’m better. I don’t feel it, but I let them

say so, because it amuses some and reassures others. I do believe

that I shall get better, but the axe has struck the roots of the tree,

and the blow has shaken its whole interior. It is nature’s first

warning, it is the beginning of infirmity. I shall live for another ten

years, twenty perhaps, but it’s no longer like living, and I consider

myself struck off the list of those who have a firm grasp on the

world and a future. I shall take advantage of my good spells to

finish my book if I can.^34

During that winter of 1824–5, as he gradually regained his health,

Constant made tentative contact with the secretary of Louis-Philippe and

the Orle-anist camp. It became clear that a government as regressive and

reactionary as Charles X’s Ultras, in which the King was keen to involve
himself, would sooner or later be brought down by the very extremism of

its measures. Among those measures were laws to compensate former

émigrés and their heirs for property they had lost through confiscation

under the revolutionary land settlement. The indemnity to former émigrés

enraged not only Constant, who made speeches in January, February and
March 1825 against it; it incensed many others in France including

property owners who resented these privileges which were now being

Apotheosis 251