his being responsible for the whole of that part of the Duke’s
correspondence which was in French.
30
Nevertheless his earnings were
still modest and barely sufficient to cover the expense of setting up home
in Brunswick. (Despite repeated vows to abstain, he frequently found the
attractions of the gaming-table too much for him.) Constant and Minna
were married on 8 May 1789, and as a wedding present Juste gave his son
6,600 livres and the inheritance due to him from his mother’s estate. It
also appears that the Duke gave the couple a house and probably a sum of
money.^31
But Constant’s thoughts were elsewhere: throughout the winter and spring he had
worked ceaselessly, producing in collaboration with his father a stream of factual and
polemical documents, the most important of which have been published—some for the
first time—in C.P. Courtney’s 1990 anthology, The Affair of Colonel Juste de Constant
and Related Documents (1787–1796). Constant’s summaries of the injustices perpetrated
against Juste show his mastery of Ciceronian invective, particularly in the long Mémoire
pour Juste Constant de Rebecque, as well as his ability to sketch character and motive in
just a few words: as C.P. Courtney suggests it is a very early attempt at ‘the
fictionalization of experience’ (p. lii). There was only a brief respite from these
preoccupations for Constant and Minna during their stay in Lausanne in July– August
- Constant took the opportunity to visit Isabelle de Charrière, but was generally in
poor health and depressed. Matters were not improved by his learning that his friend
J.R.Knecht, whom he had known in Berne some years before, in circumstances he alludes
to enigmatically in Ma Vie by a reference to ‘Greek love’,^32 had been found guilty of
pederasty and banished from Bernese territory: another victim of the ‘Bears’ of Berne.
With the prospect of a return to the legal battlefields of Holland in the autumn of 1789,
an increasing note of acrimony entered his correspondence with Isabelle de Charrière.
Isabelle knew full well the kind of man Juste was—difficult, quarrelsome and far from
being an ideal father to Benjamin—and probably felt that he was not entirely without
some blame for the disasters that continued to befall him. She made the mistake of
intimating as much to Benjamin on occasion. His reaction was predictable and ferocious.
His loyalty to the all-too-human Juste—a man whom Simone Balayé has wittily observed
was ‘ni juste ni constant’,^33 neither fair nor unchanging in his behaviour—is touching for
some and irritating for others: Madame de Charrière fell into the latter category, though
she learnt to keep her counsel on the matter. She had the feelings of any clear-sighted,
well-meaning observer who is frustrated and powerless to intervene in a relationship
which has patently never matured, is unhealthily incomplete and unbalanced, and does
neither party much good. Constant’s gestures alternated between rebellion and
submission, and now it was time for the latter, with unsparing efforts to prove himself
worthy of Juste’s love and esteem. Isabelle had seen the young man she loved and
admired living his life under a dark cloud of unresolved emotions about his father and
family, and had tried to liberate him, to allow him to become himself. She was to pay a
high price for doing so.
Unwittingly—and unjustly on the evidence of their surviving correspondence—she
became the focus of deep resentment on Constant’s part. From the autumn of 1789 her
advice, her jokes, her opinions became unwelcome to him, in a manner not unlike what
Benjamin constant 134