Baron Constant—whom I remember well. His appearances in the
Society did him great credit, altho’ perhaps we could hardly have
anticipated his occupying so highly distinguished a place as he
afterwards did, in the Legislative Council & Government of
France. He was much esteemed in the speculative; and his loss
seems to have been more regretted in France, than that of any other
Legislator.^58There was always something strange and disconcerting about Constant
which made his later success surprising, and, of course, made him warm to
un original like his friend Wilde. As Madame de Staël reports after a
conversation with Sir James Mackintosh in 1814: ‘Mackintosh says you
passed for the most extraordinary person in Edinburgh and indeed I think
you are in every sense’.^59 For all his oddity—of which some part was, no
doubt, a deliberate pose—good reports of Constant’s progress were getting
back to his father in Holland. In June 1784 Juste de Constant could write
to Jean-Baptiste Suard, the publiciste or literary journalist: ‘People have
written to me to say that he deserves my confidence in him and that he is
studying with great application and some success’.^60 It was Juste de
Constant’s plan that Benjamin should be uprooted yet again in October
1784 and sent to Paris where he would live at Suard’s house. However this
would not allow his son to be introduced to all that was brightest and best
in London literary circles: Benjamin would not therefore be arriving in
Paris till December!^61 In the event Benjamin appears to have hung on in
Edinburgh as long as possible, enjoying every minute. Indeed his
departure after Easter 1785, when excessive gambling meant that he could
put his creditors off no longer, resulted in his having almost completed a
second academic year of lectures and society debates.^62
The picture that emerges of Constant’s life outside the lecture halls of Edinburgh is a
reasonably clear if incomplete one. In Ma Vie he confesses to having got drunk a few
times with Richard Kentish,^63 and probably did so with others. But we do not know
anything about Constant’s being, as Wilde says, ‘a slave to the passion of love, yet
varying perpetually in its objects’.^64 We do not know whether he kept a mistress, visited a
brothel, or was entirely chaste in his affections, although the last would be surprising.
There is an allusion in one of Isabelle de Charrière’s letters to Constant’s ‘amie
d’Ecosse’, ‘Scottish woman friend’.^65 Nonetheless the memory of Edinburgh that
remained in Constant’s mind was one of his own ascetic determination to work hard and
achieve academic distinction, whatever extra-curricular excesses there may have been
along the way. The first page of Adolphe summarizes it thus:
The charms of friendship 59