Benjamin Constant

Benjamin responded by believing—or at least claiming to

believe—that his uncle was indifferent to him and asking for his

affection. Samuel’s annoyance was taken up by Benjamin’s cousins

Rosalie and Lisette. Benjamin met their doubts about him with

amusing and sometimes mordant, barbed witticisms about the

affection they said they felt for him.^29

Rudler’s own comment is:

There was in reality sincere affection on both sides between these

people who only wished to be close to one another, and it is sad to

see them looking for each other, testing each other out, suspecting

each other’s good faith, provoking each other, and finally falling

out. The squabble was to last for more than twelve years.^30

In Rudler’s view the sudden cooling off of relations with Benjamin’s

uncle and cousins drove the young man in on himself and made him

unduly sensitive thereafter to anyone’s questioning of the sincerity of his
feelings. This may well be so, but it must also be said that the demi-

brouille, the strains in their relationships had also been provoked by a

series of pin-pricks from Samuel and his family which Benjamin had

experienced the previous January during a stay with them in Geneva
31

. As

in the affair of the mémoire, Samuel appears to have reminded Benjamin
once too often of the gratitude that he ought to feel towards his uncle for

all his kindness. Protesting that he really was grateful, Benjamin had

written to Rosalie reminding her how lonely and isolated he would be if

she too now turned against him as her father appeared to be doing:

Don’t follow his example. Think of us marooned here at Le Désert,

unable to leave because of the snow, rain and cold. Remember me

in particular: my stomach, chest and eyes are very bad, and you

promised me you would make me forget my ailments. Please

consider how cruel it is to take away a poor wretch’s last

consolation. Obliged to renounce all the vanities of this world, the

only resource I have left is your friendship.^32

Even if we ignore the playfully melodramatic exaggeration of those
sentences—an example of Constant’s adding a representational ingredient

to the expression of feelings he nonetheless truly felt and thereby risking

being thought insincere—it is nonetheless clear that some time before the

Benjamin constant 74