3 ISABELLE DE CHARRIERE (1785–1787)
I said something to Hochet yesterday which I think is very
true. He was talking to me about my former reputation for
saying hurtful things about others. I explained to him that at
the time I was living with a group of close friends and they
had all encouraged me to mock the rest of polite society. I
was 18 and thought it very agreeable to achieve success
through my witticisms. Besides, all I was doing was to record
and express what all of them were saying about each other. I
was expressing friendship, but they took it to be hatred.
(Journaux intimes, 28 February 1805^1 )Why Constant loved gambling has never been satisfactorily explained.
2
It
was the fashionable thing for a young man of his class to do, certainly,
other members of his family also gambled; he was fairly well off, at least
as a young man, and could usually afford to do it. But gambling also
meant humiliation when he lost all the money he had with him—as he
sometimes did—and there was no necessity at all for him to undergo that.
He was no impoverished Dostoevsky, trying by one last desperate throw
of the dice or turn of the roulette wheel to win enough to feed a family or
buy time with his creditors. There was no apparent need for Constant to
gamble. Yet, just below the surface and ready to erupt at any opportunity,
there was a craving in him, the source of which probably had subterranean
links with Constant’s attempts at—or contemplation of—suicide. The
indescribable exhilaration of entering the tripot, the gambling den came,
perhaps, from the satisfaction of a deep wish to let go of himself, to put
himself in danger, to trust entirely to chance. This is not, of course, the
only possible hypothesis that can be advanced, but it comes close to
Constant’s own view on the matter expressed in De l’esprit de conquête et
de l’usurpation in 1814:
Benjamin constant 64