Benjamin Constant

filled—apparently in spite of himself—with both pity and contempt, tenderness and

aggression, feelings he was likely then to be experiencing towards Madame de Staël.

The context in which this extraordinary passage occurs is highly significant

psychologically: in awe at the calamity which is about to befall the woman towards

whom his feelings are to say the least ambivalent, Constant has made enormous

efforts to be the one to break the news of Jacques Necker’s death to Germaine, and

he is shortly to witness her shock and anguish at the loss of the person she probably

loved and admired more than anyone in the world. And once again we are brought

close to the mystery outlined earlier in Chapter 1, ‘“The grief that does not speak”:

Constant and his father’, a mystery, I would suggest, intimately connected with the

death of his mother. See Dennis Wood, ‘Constant and the case of Ann Hurle’,

French Studies Bulletin, no. 5 (Winter 1982/3), pp. 6–8, and Georges Poulet,

Benjamin Constant par lui-même, Paris: Du Seuil, 1968, pp. 34–5.

67. Constant, Œuvres, p. 318.


68. Constant, Œuvres, p. 344.


69. Constant, Œuvres, p. 357.


70. Constant, Œuvres, p. 393.


71. Constant, Œuvres, pp. 412–13, diary entry for 21 November 1804.


72. Constant, Œuvres, p. 469.


73. Constant, Œuvres, p. 405.


74. See Benjamin Constant et Madame de Staël, Lettres à un ami. Cent onze lettres
    inédites à Claude Hochet, ed. Jean Mistler, Neuchâtel: A la Baconnière, [1949].


75. Constant, Œuvres, p. 434.


76. Constant, Œuvres, p. 449.


77. Constant, Œuvres, p. 453.


78. Constant, Œuvres, p. 485.


79. Constant, Œuvres, p. 481.


80. Constant, Œuvres, p. 516, diary entry for 4 May 1804.


81. Constant, Œuvres, p. 514.


82. Constant, Œuvres, p. 517.


83. Constant, Œuvres, p. 553.


84. Constant, Œuvres, p. 560.


85. Ghislain de Diesbach, op. cit., pp. 362 and 365.


86. Constant, Œuvres, p. 575.


87. See Georges Poulet’s perceptive observations on this image in his Benjamin
    Constant par lui-même, op. cit., pp. 40–4.


88. Ghislain de Diesbach, op. cit., pp. 365–6.


89. Constant, Œuvres, p. 580.


90. Constant, Œuvres, p. 586.


91. Dorette Berthoud, La Seconde Madame Benjamin Constant, Lausanne: Librairie
    Payot, 1943, pp. 81–2.


92. Constant, Œuvres, p. 589.


93. Constant, Œuvres, p. 590.

List of abbreviations 300