The reference to the folder concerns a dispute between Beaune and
Charlotte: the secretary maintained that Constant had promised to leave
him money in his will; Charlotte, however, said there was nothing about
such a bequest among Constant’s papers in the folder. Jean-Jacques
Coulmann records in his Réminiscences that Constant’s death occurred at
5 o’clock in the evening in his room at the Tivoli Baths, and that the
numerous doctors who subsequently examined his body found no visible
specific organic illness and attributed his death to the ‘progressive
weakening... exhaustion and fatigue of a nervous system which was no
longer working’.^66
The funeral on 12 December 1830 amounted to a lavish state occasion, the biggest
event in Paris since the Revolution the previous summer. Enormous crowds lined the
streets, detachments of guards accompanied the body; many different organizations were
represented in the cortège, and students and young people were particularly numerous.
The whole Chamber of Deputies turned out, with the Prime Minister and Constant’s old
colleague General Lafayette. The service was held at the Protestant church in the Rue
Saint Antoine, and then Constant’s coffin was carried by students towards the Père
Lachaise cemetery. On the way the cry went up from the students ‘To the Panthéon!’—
the Church of Sainte Geneviève in the Latin Quarter which had become a cemetery for
national heroes after the Revolution of 1789 and where Mirabeau had been interred—but
the police ruled otherwise. The cortège continued to its destination, speeches were made,
one by the aging Lafayette who was now so unsteady on his feet that he almost fell into
the grave himself, and then the body was laid to rest at the Père Lachaise cemetery, where
it still lies.^67
Benjamin constant 262