There is in the world, without the world being aware of it, a serious
German writer who has observed very wisely apropos of a piece of
guttering which a soldier was melting down to make musket-balls,
that the worker who put the guttering up in the first place never
suspected that it would one day kill one of his descendants. Thus it
was, Madame—for that is how one ought to begin in order to give
one’s sentences the right philosophical ponderousness—thus it was,
I say, that when I took tea with you every day last week and talked
reason I never suspected that for all my reason I was about to do
something enormously foolish; that boredom would arouse love in
me and I would lose my head, and instead of leaving for ’s-
Hertogenbosch I would leave for England with hardly any money
and with absolutely no idea where I was making for. And yet that is
what happened in the strangest of ways.^17And so on. The most unmistakeable feature of Constant’s letters from
England is, of course, their literariness. We begin here with a reference to
Goethe’s play Götz von Berlichingen (1773), followed by a sentence that
is quite deliberately reminiscent of Voltaire’s Candide (1759) playing on
the unforeseeableness of Constant’s present incongruous situation. It is
quite obvious that he relishes at last having just the right audience for
fireworks like these. What is more significant still, however, in his
brilliant letters from England—their verbal extravagance, the striking of a
variety of poses worthy of Rameau’s nephew as reimagined by Diderot—
is Constant’s enjoyment of writing. In what has survived of his
correspondence with his family there was little scope for this—his letter to
his uncle Samuel quoted in the previous chapter is a fairly representative
sample—and we are singularly unfortunate in no longer possessing his
letters either to John Wilde or to Johann Rudolf Knecht which might have
given us a more appropriate yardstick. But even so it is doubtful whether
they could in any way match these letters to Isabelle de Charrière. Their
essential difference from his letters to his family is Constant’s exhilaration
in addressing a writer—he goes out of his way to refer to an incident in
her novel Caliste, which had recently appeared and was, it seems, highly
thought of generally. For a young man brought up to harbour literary
ambitions as high as his, this was no doubt a delightful irritant that would
not let him rest. And as we shall see presently, it was during his stay in
England that Constant set to work on a first novel of his own.
Constant’s first letter from Dover is dominated by the idea of freedom. He chose
England as a refuge because it was the freest country he knew and, despite his having
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