37.
Kurt Kloocke, op. cit., p. 354.
- Constant not only published articles in the Minerve (C.P.Courtney, A Guide to the
Published Works of Benjamin Constant, op. cit., pp. 227–8), but also a short book,
Des Elections de 1818 (Concerning the Elections of 1818).
- See the useful introduction to Benjamin Constant et Goyet de la Sarthe.
Correspondance, 1818–1822, ed. Ephraïm Harpaz, Geneva: Droz (Travaux
d’histoire éthico-politique, 26), 1973.
- Menos, pp. 547–8, letter to Charles de Constant of 16 December 1818.
11 APOTHEOSIS (1819–1830)
- C.P.Courtney, ‘Benjamin Constant in 1817: a contemporary pen-portrait’, Revue de
littérature comparée, 235, 59e année, no. 3 (juillet-septembre 1985), pp. 287–90.
- When in Paris Sir James Mackintosh had noted on 23 December 1814:
Constant called to read his pamphlet on the Responsibility of
Ministers. In composing for the press, he never used paper. He writes
on small cards, which are tied together by a string. He pretends that
this facilitates addition and insertion; and enables him easily to
change the place of his ideas till they are in what he thinks the best
order. But nobody, except a writer of sententious brevity and
detached maxims, could endure such a mode of writing; and it
probably increases his tendency to an aphoristic style.
(Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Sir James
Mackintosh, ed. Robert James Mackintosh, London: Edward
Moxon, 1835, 2 vols, vol. II, pp. 323–4.)
3.
Quoted in Dorette Berthoud, Constance et grandeur de Benjamin Constant,
Lausanne: Librairie Payot, 1944, pp. 70–1. François-Adolphe, Baron de Loève-
Veimars (1801–54), was a historian and man of letters who published letters and
reminiscences of Constant in the Revue des Deux-Mondes in February 1833.
- Constant’s Eloge de Sir Samuel Romilly (In Praise of Sir Samuel Romilly)
(C.P.Courtney, A Bibliography of Editions of the Writings of Benjamin Constant to
1833, London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1981, pp. 92–4, item 36a)
appeared in January 1819. Constant greatly admired the liberal principles of Sir
Samuel Romilly (1757–1818), the lawyer and Whig politician, whom he seems to
have met for the first time in Paris in October 1815 (Constant, Œuvres, p. 799), for
his vigorous championing of the rights of the individual within the legal framework
of an ordered society. They no doubt met again during Constant’s stay in London
during the first half of 1816. (See Brian Rigby, ‘Benjamin Constant and the Eloge de
Sir Samuel Romilly’, ABC, no. 7 (1987), pp. 21–38.) Constant continued to think
highly of the Elogeand in the last weeks of his life, towards the end of 1830, appears
to have been planning to republish it and to have it translated into English.
- Kurt Kloocke, Benjamin Constant: une biographie intellectuelle, Geneva-Paris:
Droz (Histoire des idées et critique littéraire, 218), 1984, p. 354.
List of abbreviations 311
