Constant de Rebecque. If I had to bring together the sort of person I
really like with the kind for whom I have only aversion and
contempt, I could not have chosen better. That man brings together
bad qualities that are diametrically opposed to each other:
coarseness and affectation, stupidity and maliciousness, prodigality
and avarice. He is in fact a Monstrum nulla virtute redemptum [a
monster unredeemed by any virtue].^44Gibbon’s extreme antipathy to the father may well have prejudiced him
against the son.
It is easy, then, to imagine Constant’s frustration, given his growing taste for historical
scholarship. The great man was within a year of completing his Decline and Fall, and
Constant, as his Preface to his translation of Gillies shows, was in awe of Gibbon’s
achievement to the extent that he contemplated translating some or all of the six volumes.
Nevertheless the 50-year-old Gibbon kept his young admirer at a distance. Whether the
failure of their ‘connoissance’ to develop further had anything to do with what Constant
mentions next in Ma Vie it is impossible to say. For Constant became the friend of
Johann Rudolf Knecht (1762–1820), the son of a rich Bourgeois or burgess of Berne, and
was in correspondence with him for at least two years thereafter, though there is now no
trace of their letters.^45 Knecht, five years older than Constant, was a homosexual, and it is
not impossible that the ‘Amours grecs’ is a reference to the relationship between them;
Constant may, on the other hand, simply have meant to write in later at this point in Ma
Vie an account of Knecht’s relationships with others. It is not entirely implausible,
however, that precisely at this time in his life, at the age of 18 or 19, Constant should
have formed a homosexual attachment, perhaps with the older Knecht himself. In the
spring and summer of 1786 Constant’s family appeared to have turned against him, and
his feelings towards his father were moving towards the crisis of the following year when
he was to run away to England. As we have seen from Charles de Constant’s letters of
November and December 1786, Juste was relentlessly difficult at this period of his life:
‘caustique et impérieux’,^46 high-handed and with a caustic wit, he was perpetually in
disagreement with those around him, a fact which had already forced him to take
eighteen months leave from his regiment (May 1785–March 1787). Never at peace with
himself, Juste turned his restless critical mind on his son, and when they were together he
simply would not leave him alone, but kept up a relentless barrage of cavilling and
argument.
Benjamin, who had already internalized the literary ambitions his father had sought for
so long to instil in him, must also have developed very early a strong sense of inferiority
vis-à-vis this impossibly overbearing old man, and a feeling of guilt whenever—and it
seemed to be all the time—he failed to satisfy his many and frequently contradictory
demands on him. It would hardly be surprising therefore if Benjamin had no immediate
model with whom to identify in order to discover his own masculinity; if, fearful and
timid in his father’s presence, he found himself attracted to another man with whom he
could identify and who gave him that affection which Juste was seldom able to show to
his son (although he certainly felt it); if that man, finally, were such as to evoke
admiration as well as affection in Benjamin. In the previous chapter I suggested that John
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