not simply freedom from a mistress but freedom in all its aspects,
political, religious, the right to privacy, and so on. But still more
important, Verhoeff hardly gives sufficient credit to Constant for the
exemplary triumph that his life represents of Eros over Thanatos, the
positive life wish over the death wish.
For against that nightmare of death which filled him with such stark terror even in the
brightest noonday of his life, and against the temptation of despair and suicide. Constant
marshalled all the resources of humour, hard work and commitment to a political or
moral cause. He seldom surrendered to the overtly Romantic and only in a few private
fragments to morbid Gothic melancholy,^6 unlike his contemporary Chateaubriand. His
written style at its best—as in Adolphe, Ma Vie, in many of his letters or De l’esprit de
conquête—is concise, direct and luminous. (For the benefit of the non-French speaker, it
would be no exaggeration to liken its hypnotic power to the experience of listening to one
of Schubert’s late piano sonatas.) Through all the struggles, adventures and sufferings
recounted in his letters and diaries Constant’s overriding urge was to see himself clearly,
to understand himself and to improve his behaviour. And to confide some of the
disobliging things he knew or might suspect posterity would read took more than self-
obsession: it took courage. Perhaps the contrast which Alfred Fabre-Luce makes between
Chateaubriand and Constant comes closest to what, despite his many faults, remains
fascinating and appealing about Constant. He imagines first a visitor being received in
Viscount Chateaubriand’s impeccably well-ordered salon with starchy politeness, and
then the visitor’s relief at being welcomed like a friend into the chaotic disorder of
Constant’s study.^7
If there can ever be such a thing as the right moment to die, then Constant appears to
have found it. He was fortunate not to see the idealism of 1830 evaporate entirely^8 and
Louis-Philippe preside over a society of harsh laissez-faire capitalism and greed. In 1831
Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir marked the beginning of a new kind of French novel, the
third-person novel painting a vast fresco of social life, so unlike the intimate scale of
Adolphe—although Stendhal’s wit and irony had much in common with that found
elsewhere in Constant’s writings. Death also spared Constant disappointment at the
reception accorded to the fruit of a lifetime of work on the history of religion: the ever-
faithful Charlotte, who jealously watched over her husband’s reputation, saw to it that in
April 1831 the last two volumes of De la religion were published, and then at last in
April 1833 Du polythéisme romain in two volumes,^9 intended by Constant to complete
the work begun in De la religion. They pleased neither the scholars—being already
outdated and superficial in some areas—nor any of the Christian churches: his ideas were
vague and lacking in precise commitment. One by one Constant’s friends and loved ones
died, Sir James Mackintosh in 1832, Rosalie de Constant in 1834, Albertine de Staël in
1838, and finally Charlotte in 1845.
Charlotte had continued to receive literary figures in her salon, where a bust of
Constant by Bra had pride of place.^10 She had kept his memory alive, treasuring the death
mask made of her husband by the sculptor Gois and even planning a monumental frieze
to be carved by Théophile Bra, probably for Constant’s tomb. Lack of money, however,
seems to have prevented the latter project from being realized. Many tributes had been
paid to Constant after his death, and of these she had kept one of the most moving—a
Epilogue 265