his brother. I gambled, lost, accumulated debts left and right, and
my whole stay in Edinburgh was ruined. The date my father had set
for me to leave came round and I left, promising my creditors I
would repay them, but leaving them very displeased with me and
having made a very bad impression. I returned via London where I
spent three weeks quite fruitlessly, and I arrived in Paris during
May 1785.^5There are various candidates for the honour of having thus brought
Constant’s happiest experiences to an end. Perhaps the most likely are the
Puppo brothers, Giuseppe and Stephano: Giuseppe is known to have
taught singing and his brother languages (French, Italian, Spanish and
Portuguese) in Edinburgh in the late 1770s, though no evidence has
survived about any other source of income they may have had.^6 The game
which proved to be Constant’s downfall, faro, was the downfall of many
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In its early form it was simple
enough, and involved the player placing a bet on the one card he was
dealt: if the dealer, counting through the rest of the cards in the pack, then
turned up a card of the same rank first on a pile to his right the player won
the amount he had bet. The excitement this generated in adepts of the
game is perhaps difficult for us to conceive, but it was considerable
enough for faro to be banned by name in some parts of Europe. What
seems to have completely enthralled so many gamblers was the tension
between staying on in the game or withdrawing—certainly the kind of
problem likely to appeal to Constant. Evidently Constant made some bad
decisions in Edinburgh or, as is not improbable, the dealer was crooked. It
meant he had to leave cherished and admired friends to whom he was
perhaps in debt with little hope of seeing them again or perhaps even of
being able to repay them.
In late May 1785, if we are to trust the chronology of Ma Vie, Constant arrived in
Paris where Juste had arranged for him to live under the protection of the Suard family.
Unhappily his room was not ready for him, so he had to stay at a hotel. There he fell in
with a rich and dissolute young Englishman and soon ran up a fresh set of debts.^7 When
at length he was able to move into his room at the house of the literary man Jean-Baptiste
Suard (1734–1817), he made a further undesirable acquaintance, that of a Pastor
Baumier, recommended to his father by the Protestant chaplain to the Dutch Ambassador,
though fortunately, as Constant notes in Ma Vie, he was ‘humourless, boring and very
insolent’ and therefore Constant soon tired of him. Baumier lent him money,
accompanied him to Parisian brothels and later wrote to Juste de Constant to denounce
Benjamin’s behaviour.^8
Benjamin constant 66