Benjamin Constant

uncle has mocked other people and thwarted their wishes the whole

time, Benjamin has been in a state of despair, and I’ve been bored,

albeit rather more cheerfully than my companions. My cousin

keeps repeating these four lines of verse:

You who are poisoning my life

Do not increase my pain.

My fate is an unenviable one:

Why take even my misery away from me?

He addresses them to his father.... My uncle, despite the

pleasure he takes in contradicting other people, doesn’t like to be

contradicted himself.^37

When they arrived in Paris, Juste insisted that his son be addressed as

‘Monsieur le baron de Constant’, kept him short of money and did all he
could to introduce him into literary circles. Charles considered this last

venture to be foredoomed: ‘I would be willing to bet that Benjamin will

never be famous’,^38 he observed, but in another letter, of 4 December

1786, he more than made up for his wrong prediction with a paragraph of

remarkable insight:

I must talk to you about my uncle: 1) he gets on my nerves; 2) he

bores me; 3) I don’t like him. All that is perhaps my fault. But his

character—suspicious, restless, arrogant, tiresome and given to

mockery—is very uncongenial to me. I can well understand

Benjamin’s despair: it is a direct result of all of this, and I think I

can detect that he doesn’t love his father; that his father’s wish to

get in the way of everything he does—without exception—and his

disagreeing with everything Benjamin says is making him

unhappy. The young man has strong emotions and a passionate

love of liberty; he finds his situation a cruel one. Is Benjamin right

or wrong? You can judge for yourselves. He’s more likely to do

something stupid than if he were left alone.^39

Constant’s love for Mrs Trevor soon evaporated now that Paris offered

him a thousand different distractions. Their correspondence petered out,
and when he saw her again three months later he felt absolutely nothing

for her. She on the other hand was astonished at his coolness, and no doubt

a little shocked. As usual in Ma Vie Constant adds the inevitable unhappy

postscript; Harriet Trevor returned to England and by 1811 had become

Isabelle de charriere 77