Benjamin Constant

It has often been said that gamblers are the most immoral of men.

This is because they risk each day everything they possess. For

them there is no guaranteed future. They live and pursue their

activities in the empire of chance.^3

For the reasons outlined in Chapter 1, Constant’s life was dominated by

anxiety and uncertainty about the present and the future. Gambling was

perhaps both an opportunity to act out such anxious expectation (which of

course also included an element of pleasure, albeit somewhat
masochistic), and an opportunity to obtain his revenge on destiny. In the

ebb and flow of winning and losing, Constant experienced a sense of

freedom and power over his own fortunes that had been denied him as a

child and continued to elude him in his subservience to his father as an

adolescent. The game of cards was, then, a real as well as a symbolic way
of playing with his life, and also a form of therapy, since through it he

could express his (usually ambivalent) feelings towards his predicament.
According to the Freudian commentator Han Verhoeff, to win while gambling was for
Constant the equivalent of winning the love he had always needed but seldom received.^4
Verhoeff’s theory appears plausible if we accept that it was the euphoria of occasional
success that brought Constant back again and again to the gaming table. There is,
however, a further possibility which I would like to propose and one which brings
together elements from each of these hypotheses. This is that Constant gambled for the
pleasure of gambling: that winning was only a secondary motivation; that Constant
played because he needed to live in a state of perpetual crisis, because he enjoyed taking
great risks with his life. Verhoeff’s suggestion that to win at cards was for Constant like a
winning of love can then be taken a stage further. For obtaining a woman’s love was
never, in Constant’s life, the end of the game. The gambler in him could never withdraw
from play entirely and was immediately driven on by the anticipated thrill of the next
game, forgetful of his winnings from the previous one.
Whether or not such a view is accepted, there was a restless urgency in Constant’s
activities during his late adolescence suggesting something of the gambler’s headlong
rush from one risk to the next. It produced in him a feeling of discontinuity in
relationships and events which he is certain to have relished as well as deplored. The
habit of gambling never let go of him, and right into middle age, when he had become a
respected member of the French Assembly, he would take the opportunity of a late-night
sitting of the House to slip out to a nearby gaming-house. It was a habit he probably first
acquired at Erlangen in 1782–3, and one which abruptly terminated ‘the most agreeable
year of [his] life’ in Edinburgh. In Ma Vie Constant describes what happened:

I lived for about eighteen months in Edinburgh, enjoying myself a

great deal, keeping fairly busy and having only good things said

about me. But ill-fortune decreed that a little Italian who was

giving me music lessons should introduce me to a faro bank run by

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