As he travelled north by coach his thoughts were also with his father from
whom he had not heard and to whom he wrote one of his most moving
pleas on 18 May 1811:
My dear father, I beg you to give me back your affection, to allow
me still to consider myself a friend to Charles and Louise.... Do
not make me despair at leaving you once more without being able
to hope that your heart has found once again its former kindness
towards me.^66The poignancy of the letter is increased by Constant’s obvious feeling that
he might never see his ailing but intractable father again, a premonition
which was to be fully justified.
As Constant and Charlotte neared Germany, he returned to his Polythéisme which he
seems not to have touched for several months. Via Berne, Basle and Freiburg they
reached Strasbourg on 10 June and halted for a week, then travelled on at a leisurely
pace, arriving in Göttingen on 18 August 1811. In the various cities they passed through
on the way Constant’s gambling mania took hold of him again—possibly a response to
hidden emotional stresses—and he and his wife appear to have lost a considerable
amount of money. But his intellect was fired again by the polytheism project which he
decided in Strasbourg to divide up into forty-four books:^67 this was to be the basis of the
version of Du polythéisme romain which would finally be published. Once in Göttingen
he renewed his friendship with Charles de Villers whom he had met in Metz eight years
before. Villers taught French literature at Göttingen University and Constant shared with
him a fascination with German thought: through him Constant was slowly to come to
know members of the university staff, a university which at this time rivalled Edinburgh
as the finest in Europe and which boasted a magnificent library. The town itself,
furthermore, was the perfect image of quiet, provincial Germany, with its half-timbered
houses and watermills. Its tranquility was rarely disturbed by anything but the sound of
livestock being herded through the streets in the early morning. The cuisine might be
considerably more basic than Constant had been used to at Coppet, but if peace was what
he was really looking for, it was to be found in plenty in this bucolic haven. On 2
December 1811 he described some of the inhabitants to Claude Hochet:
Life [in Göttingen] is entirely inward, and anyone who is not
dedicated to a life of thought could not survive here. The university
teachers, who are certainly the most learned and enlightened in the
whole of Europe, do not even stay together as a community but live
apart, each in his own home. They work from 5 in the morning
until 6 in the evening, then they sit smoking with their family, with
wives who are little more than housekeepers. There they forget
their studies and listen to the gossip these housekeepers tell them,
judging it a better distraction from their labours than more seriousItaliam 211