his mother, the rivalry between his female relatives to compensate for that
loss, his arbitrary removal from that circle in order to be entrusted to
Marianne Magnin whom he detested, and Juste’s subsequent unpredictable
and often wrong-headed treatment of him—produced a number of
characteristic traits which remained with him to the grave, among them
those to which Coulmann and Laboulaye allude. True, he seems to have
inherited from Juste some of his restlessness and changeableness, as well
as his intellect and sharp tongue. Nevertheless the effects of a haphazard
upbringing from which maternal love was signally absent left an indelible
mark on him. Laboulaye’s comment is obviously true: This child who had
no mother and who was consumed by a need to love, had not found in his
father that maternal tenderness, that warmth of affection that he needed in
order to become a fulfilled human being.’
3
And Laboulaye goes on to
rehabilitate Isabelle de Charrière’s role in Constant’s life, so often decried
by commentators and, curiously, by Constant himself:
In my opinion Madame de Charrière did not play the kind of part
that has been attributed to her. She was something better: the
intelligent and devoted friend of a young man who had no mother
and who was looking around him for the affection he could not find
in his father’s house.... One can understand how Constant, having
found the happiness he had missed, allowed himself to be caressed
by a mother’s hand while continuing to show all the egoism and
thoughtlessness of a child.^4The Dutch Freudian critic Han Verhoeff, in his 1976 study of Constant
and Adolphe, saw the source of Constant’s behaviour towards women in
his sense of having been ‘abandoned’ by his mother.^5 What Verhoeff sees
as almost the flow of an alternating current of affection and aggression,
attachment and the desire for separation vis-à-vis the women in his life
stems from that early loss. It is a theory which at first reading gives one a
sudden shock of deep recognition, the feeling that here at last is the key to
all of Constant. But one only has to step back a few paces to realize that it
offers only a much reduced and simplified part of the whole picture.
Constant’s attachment and aggression could be on occasion exercised as
readily in non-sexual friendships with men as in sexual ones with
women—his journals show this. But, more important, Verhoeff does not
take full account of other facets of Constant’s personality which were as
fundamental to him—his deep and passionate love of liberty, for example,
Epilogue 264