The effect of Henriette’s death can only have been to exacerbate all these tendencies
in Juste de Constant. He was never able to show his feelings directly and openly, and,
where Benjamin was concerned, those feelings must in any case have been complex.
Juste’s whole career as an army officer had reinforced his distrust—and perhaps fear—of
emotion, a condition which Ian Suttie once described in The Origins of Love and Hate as
‘a taboo on tenderness’.^26 His mourning for his wife can only have been prolonged and
rendered more painful by this, and would not have helped him in his relationship with his
son, whom moreover he saw only occasionally. Benjamin inherited certain of these
characteristics from his father genetically—changeableness and the fretful restlessness or
inquiétude of the whole Constant family—but appears also to have inherited from
elsewhere the ability not only to feel but also to display very strong emotions. The little
boy’s expressions of joy or sorrow can only have been a source of embarrassment to his
father who, while encouraging his son’s already prodigious intellectual powers, neglected
Benjamin’s feelings. By the time Benjamin Constant had reached adulthood, he could
describe their chronically difficult relationship in the following terms: ‘He is silent and I
am cool. Each of us in his own way has grown very subdued in his relationship with the
other, and while we love each other a great deal, we are often at a loss to know what to
say to each other’.^27 We have the confirmation of Constant’s friend Sismondi (1773–
1842), if any were needed, that the description of Adolphe’s father in Constant’s novel is
an exact portrait of Juste de Constant in his relationship with Benjamin:
Unfortunately his behaviour where I was concerned was high-
minded and generous rather than loving. I was very aware of his
right to my gratitude and respect. But we had never taken each
other into our confidence. He had an ironic turn of mind which did
not suit my own character. At that age all I wanted to do was
abandon myself completely to primitive and passionate feelings
which transport the individual beyond the common realm of
everyday experience, and which inspire only disdain for the people
and things around one. I found in my father not a severe critic but
an unemotional observer who was given to making caustic remarks,
a man who would begin a conversation with a pitying smile on his
face and soon after would be impatient to end it as quickly as
possible. In all of my first eighteen years I cannot recall ever
having had a conversation lasting an hour with him.^28Why Juste should have been unable to show the love he felt, why he hid
from his feelings behind irony we do not know. A clue would seem to lie
in his having been brought up ‘avec beaucoup de sévérité’, ‘very strictly’,
by his puritanical officer father, Samuel de Constant (1676–1756),
29
and
had a hardly less formidable and strong-willed mother, ‘la Générale’
Rose-Susanne de Constant (1698–1782) with whom he seems to have had
a particularly bad relationship, indeed one which in later years took on the
The grief that does not speak 21