Benjamin Constant

extension to my lease of life of two or three years again. Some

things are so intriguing that one wants to see—I don’t say how they

turn out in the end, but at least what happens next.^61

By December he was unable to climb a staircase, and now divided his time

between his house, 17 Rue d’Anjou, and the Tivoli Baths, which were in
effect a kind of nursing home. Nevertheless, faithful in spirit to a personal

hero he had cited more than once in his letters, a knight in battle described

by the poet Ariosto, he fought on, unaware that he was already dead.
62

Volume IV of De la religion which had been due for publication in July

1830 had been held over because of the Revolution, and would appear
with the final volume, volume V, in April 1831:^63 Constant was working

on the proofs of volume V on 8 December 1830 shortly before he died in

the early evening. Dorette Berthoud, in her study of the life of ‘the second

Madame Benjamin Constant’, says the following about that final day:

What were Constant’s last moments like? Afraid of reviving

emotions that were too painful to bear, Charlotte refused to write

about them, even to Rosalie who had asked her to. ‘Ever since that

dreadful 8 December my life has become a torment.... The details

about him then, about those last hours of a life so cruelly cut short

weigh heavily on my heart.... Nevertheless I will give them to you,

but have pity on me. You cannot imagine how painful it is to recall

a happiness which is lost for ever with words which sum up a

whole life.’ The two women took their secret with them to the

grave.^64

But thanks to Constant’s secretary Beaune we have an eye-witness
account of that last day:

The day of his death I brought him early in the morning the last

printed page of his book. ‘I’m glad’, he said, ‘I was afraid of dying

before I had finished it. Don’t talk to me about money, don’t even

bring me the newspapers.... I feel I am very ill, and I don’t think I

shall get through the day’.... His mind was unaffected, and his

ideas were as lucid as when he was in good health.... At the end of

the day, when he was dying, he called me to him. He asked me for

his folder, it was next to him on his bed. I gave it him, he put it

under his pillow. A quarter of an hour later he passed away.^65

Apotheosis 261