the age of 5 (and later his stepmother), Marianne Magnin. If Constant came to feel guilty
about his mother’s death because of his father’s continuing grief during his childhood,
this would surely have occupied a dominant place in Constant’s mind. This is not to
underestimate the sense of loss which Constant felt when he compared himself with other
children who had mothers, or to minimize the effect on him of paternal absence or
changes of nurse, one of which at least occurred when he was 4, and which might also
have been viewed by him as an abandonment. It is, rather, to restore a sense of balance to
the picture by including Juste de Constant’s real Trauerarbeit alongside Benjamin’s
conjectured mourning, and to leave a decent space for actual childhood experience of
separation. Having said this, one is nevertheless impressed by Verhoeff’s arguing of his
case and handling of the available evidence, and left with the sense that here at last a
critic has said something profoundly true about Constant’s relationship with his character
Adolphe. One is all the more struck by Verhoeff’s hypothesis when re-reading the
passage quoted earlier about Ann Hurle, the English-woman hanged for fraud. After
describing her repeated faintings at her trial, her refusal of food and her silence right up
to the moment of her execution, Constant writes:
There is in this account such a picture of wretchedness—a weak
human being giving up without a struggle, not even expecting
anyone else to show the slightest interest, crushed by the iron hand
of an implacable society—that it inspires a particular degree of
pity. That pity, while not unmingled with contempt, nonetheless
touches the very bottom of one’s heart.^41It is, of course, the phrase ‘pour n’être pas sans mélange de mépris’,
‘while not unmingled with contempt’ (or ‘scorn’), that is so unexpected
and disconcerting, and so out of tone with what has gone before. Verhoeff,
who does not mention this passage, examines a similarly disquieting
comment on the behaviour of the dying Julie Talma in Constant’s
Journaux intimes (entry for 1 April 1805):
Dined with Madame Talma. She was so irritable, so hard on her
servants that I had to remind myself constantly that it was because
of her illness. Oh wretched human nature! The poor woman, who is
so republican and democratic in her outlook, put on a show of
aristocratic vanity that quite entertained me.^42Verhoeff sees in this and similar remarks an element of cruelty and
derision, feelings comparable, I think, with the contempt Constant feels at
Ann Hurle’s silent acquiescence in her fate. Of course there are rational
explanations for Constant’s comments in both contexts; I suppose one
could adduce the hard truthfulness about his own feelings of a
psychological realist; a belief that life is a battle which ought to be fought
The grief that does not speak 27