- See Benjamin Constant, L’Affaire Regnault, textes présentés et commentés par René
Bourgeois, Grenoble: Publications de l’Université des langues et lettres de Grenoble,
1979. Constant wrote in English to his former tutor Nathaniel May just before 1 June
1818:
I have indeed been very busy & published many perhaps too many
political pamphlets. I have however had the good fortune to prevent
an innocent mans head from falling on the scaffold & that is certainly
the best thing I have done. He was doomed to die by a noble Marquis
of Normandy whose name I hope will shine in the annals of
aristocratical infamy.
(C.P.Courtney, art. cit., p. 177)
The aristocrat involved in the Regnault affair was a local landowner, the Marquis de
Blosseville.
- Kurt Kloocke, Benjamin Constant: une biographie intellectuelle, Geneva-Paris:
Droz (Histoire des idées et critique littéraire, 218), 1984, p. 353.
- See Dennis Wood, ‘The Von Marenholtz papers: Constant in Wolfenbüttel’, French
Studies Bulletin, 24 (Autumn 1987), pp. 5–10.
- In Brunswick, for example, Charlotte had made Constant’s former mistress Caroline
her protégée when the actress had fallen on hard times. On this, see Constant’s letter
to Isabelle de Charrière of 12 May 1794, Charrière, Œuvres, IV, p. 429.
- Dennis Wood, ‘The Von Marenholtz papers’, op. cit., p. 9.
- See C.P.Courtney, A Bibliography of Editions of the Writings of Benjamin Constant
to 1833, London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1981, p. 179, item
131a(2).
- Kurt Kloocke, op. cit., p. 353. Jean-Jacques Coulmann gives a slightly different
account:
While walking one day in 1818 at Madame Davillier’s at Montalais,
in the grounds of her country house situated on the hilly slopes of
Meudon, he lost his footing. The path was steep and he broke his leg.
In haste the surgeon Dupuytren was sent for from Paris, but first aid
was given him by the local village doctor. Dupuytren decided that the
leg would have to be amputated, but the patient felt his decision was
a trifle harsh. Constant talked to the young doctor who was bold
enough to differ in his opinion from the celebrated maestro of the
operating-table. It was a
stroke of good fortune: contrary to all the predictions of medical
science, the knee healed, and for the next twelve years Benjamin
Constant was able to get about on crutches.
(J.-J.Coulmann, Réminiscences, Paris: Michel Lévy frères,
1862–9 [Slatkine Reprints, Geneva, 1973], 3 vols, vol. III, p.
67)
List of abbreviations 310
