Wilde could have been such a man. Knecht may have been another, though once again
there is no actual proof of this. What we do know for certain is that in his letters Constant
seems to have poured out his troubles to Knecht,^47 and when his friend was found guilty
of pederasty by a Bernese court in 1789, was sentenced in his absence to life
imprisonment and had all his property confiscated, Constant wrote the following to
Isabelle de Charrière on 4 August 1789:
I have had a source of real sorrow these past few days, and one
which has confirmed my dislike of life: it’s this. Do you recall a
young man named Knecht whose letters I read to you on your sofa,
in your anteroom at the end of 1787 and the beginning of 1788, and
which you enjoyed listening to? Well that same Knecht who had a
busy career and a comfortable fortune to look forward to, who was
learned, witty, full of vigour and good sense, went and got himself
involved in that wretched Socratic business in Berne. I was on the
point of writing to him when I learned that he was stigmatized,
banished and his property liable to confiscation. Gone are all the
plans and prospects, the conjectures and the joy inspired by
contemplating the future of a friend.^48It is clear from this that Constant placed a high value on Knecht’s
friendship; more than that we cannot be sure about, though no doubt in
any relationship there can be scope for a variety of feelings to coexist and
for their relative strengths to change over a period of time. If we turn to
Constant’s ‘ridicule amour’
49
for Mrs Trevor, the hypothesis of a recent
homoerotic relationship in Berne might go some way to explaining
Constant’s uncertainty with her, his ‘timidité excessive’, his excessive
shyness, and also perhaps the rather willed and artificial nature of the
whole enterprise, the element of play-acting in which, as we have seen,
Constant later came to believe. But whatever the reason for his pursuit of
her, Mrs Trevor was soon forgotten once Constant reached Paris.
Gambling had by now become a permanent and ruinous part of Constant’s behaviour
wherever he found himself, and in the French capital he lost no time in divesting himself
of most of his money at cards at the house of one Madame de Bourbonne, whom
historians have not identified. Not daring to tell his father how much he was in debt, he
wrote to the widow of a well-known playwright, Bernard-Joseph Saurin (1706–81) to ask
her for a loan. When he arrived the next day to learn her reply, the 63-year-old Madame
Saurin (1734–98) had not yet received his letter. She thereupon mistook his
embarrassment and hesitancy for a declaration of love. When she realized her error, she
handed him the money without a word, and Constant left. Ma Vie thus begins again its
amusing, self-mocking and sometimes cruel narrative of the mille folies committed by
Constant’s younger self^50 in Paris. But this stay in Paris was to be different. It would,
quite literally, change Constant’s life. He was, perhaps, in any case beginning to tire of
Benjamin constant 80