diaries,^20 but ultimately to his claim to ‘be a member of the Christian
church’.
21
Forty-five years of work began in 1785, a small first step towards which was
Constant’s translation of a chapter of The History of Ancient Greece by John Gillies,
brother of Adam Gillies of the Speculative Society. Whether or not the idea was
suggested to him by Adam Gillies, with whom he could have been in correspondence at
this time as he certainly was with John Wilde, we do not know: all trace of any letters has
been lost. But on his return to Switzerland in 1786 Constant set to work on John Gillies’s
book as soon as he could obtain a copy. His primary intention was to please his father
who was by now no doubt hoping for something tangible from the 19-year-old son he had
spent so much money educating. In the event Constant translated only Chapter II of the
History,^22 for he soon discovered that the French King’s Librarian, Carra, was in the
process of translating the whole book. Thus Constant’s own translation became a kind of
sampler, a way of gauging the public’s reaction to his style and competence as a
translator from English. He had also by now conceived a far greater project, as he states
in his Preface, that of translating Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. As
such a task would have taken a number of years of his life, it is hard not to share Rudler’s
relief that Constant subsequently abandoned the plan: ‘he had better things to do with his
talent than wasting it on such an unworthy chore.’^23 In any case such grandiose designs
were not, perhaps, entirely Constant’s own: in a letter to Isabelle de Charrière of 20
March 1788 he would describe his book as ‘a translation I did in a hurry to please my
father, which I never revised and which he was absolutely determined to whisk away
from me and have printed’.^24 The obvious inference to be drawn from this is that
although the subject interested Constant a great deal (‘the religion, government, arts,
customs and character of the Greeks’), his heart was not entirely in translating someone
else’s ideas: by now he had plenty of his own, and not all of Gillies’s were congenial to
him. The Essai sur les mœurs des tems héroïques de la Grèce, tiré de l’Histoire grecque
de M.Gillies, with its treatment of Greek religion as false and superstitious, contained
opinions very close to the orthodox Christian view expounded in Tytler’s Edinburgh
lectures, and which it must have been unpalatable for the ardently pro-pagan disciple of
Helvétius and D’Holbach that Constant now proclaimed himself to be to bring before a
wider audience.
Behind this renewal of intellectual activity there was, however, a complex and painful
family drama. Constant’s homecoming in 1786 after his Lehrjahre was far from being an
easy one for any of the parties concerned. To begin with, Constant had a horror of his
native city of Lausanne which at times bordered on the pathological. On 9 July 1793 he
would write to his friend Isabelle de Charrière:
I am completely convinced that Lausanne is uninhabitable for me.
All the lakes, mountains and beauties of Nature at her most radiant
could not erase my painful memories, could not rid the city of my
irritating relatives nor compensate for the idle tedium of Lausanne
life.
(Charrière, Œuvres, IV, p. 118)Benjamin constant 70