Benjamin Constant

qualities that suited me. He was a man who, during five years of

boredom and depression, consoled, supported and encouraged me,

a man without whom, in a word, I would have died or become as

stupid as those around me. A friend of liberty and enlightenment,

this man’s high moral stance on ethics, politics and religion

corresponded exactly with my own in every detail.... Who can give

me back that intimacy, that complete conformity on matters of

principle, that immediate mutual understanding over our ideas,

which coincided, reinforcing and complementing one another? I

always left my friend’s house feeling more knowledgeable, more

lively and more active than when I went in. If I have retained any

love for literature, for truth, or for the research which is my only

consolation, then it is to him that I owe it. He is dead, and so many

dolts are alive! And that mind which was so brilliant and so

powerful, that heart which was courageous and free, and that

capacity for sustained hard work and patient reasoning, all of that is

gone! ...It is the first time death has robbed me of someone who

was really dear to me.

(Letter of 31 January 1794^9 )

On 17 March 1805 Constant was to note in his Journaux intimes that

eleven years later he had still not got over Mauvillon’s death,
10
and when

he wrote to Mauvillon’s eldest son on 18 January 1817 he told him: ‘I will

never forget my close friendship with your father, whose memory is linked
to my earliest literary and philosophical thoughts’.^11 The first meeting of

Constant and Mauvillon doubtless took place at the Große Klub, though

Mauvillon had a low opinion of the place: he had written to a friend in

1785,

what you will find unbelievable is that this club which has more

than 150 members, included all the intelligent and learned men in

Brunswick, offers gambling as the only amusement. The only

people who meet there are usually those who want to gamble.

Fortunately I quite like gambling, so that’s some consolation for

me.^12

As well as their taste for gambling, both men discovered that they had in

common a dislike for Brunswick, which Mauvillon found more ugly than

Kassel, for example, calling it ‘a large ugly town on a completely flat
plain’, and although its Court was welcoming to foreigners, the aristocracy

he found ‘extremely arrogant’.^13 What they cannot have failed to notice

Benjamin constant 112