Germaine had disembarked in Stockholm, and now entered
enthusiastically into her plans for Bernadotte.
On 5 October 1812 in one of his characteristically long letters to Claude Hochet—
some of the most informative in the whole of his correspondence—Constant wrote:
We received news today of the destruction of Moscow. It is
difficult not to be greatly moved when one thinks of the sum total
of evils now spread across the face of the earth. This event may
prove to be of some considerable moment, quite independently of
its importance for those it is affecting directly. But here people are
so immersed in their study and research that, with [Charles de]
Villers out of town, I have been unable to find anyone to talk to
about it. A city of 500,000 inhabitants can be blown up without a
Göttingen professor lifting his eyes from his book.^11Constant could hardly have been more prescient: when Napoleon reached
Moscow the enemy, who had already cost him 30,000 men at Borodino in
September, had abandoned the city and melted into the countryside. When
in October the expected Russian peace emissaries never came and fires
broke out, the looted city was relinquished and the Grand Army retreated
westwards, first through mud, then snow. After they crossed the Beresina
on 27 November 1812, Napoleon’s troops were decimated by cold and
hunger, and by December the whole huge military machine and the
Empire it supported looked broken. Although the Emperor clung
obstinately to power for a further fifteen months, the end was in sight for
him. News of the retreat from Moscow reached Kassel where Constant
was staying with Charlotte on Christmas Day 1812. ‘Important news’ is
his laconic comment in his diary that day.
12
The exact reasons for his first
stay in Kassel (5 December 1812–18 January 1813) are unclear, as are
those for his brief return alone to Göttingen where on 19 January 1813 he
noted in his diary, ‘Arrangements. To stay or not to stay, that is the
question, perhaps that of my [whole] life.’
13
Certainly Charlotte was there
to collect money which was owed to her by various members of her
family, but Constant’s writing was seriously disturbed by the social life of
Kassel. Were his mysterious and lengthy stays in Kassel, a busy
cosmopolitan city and one of the crossroads of northern Europe, prompted
by some clandestine contact with friends of Bernadotte and perhaps an
invitation to join him, and no doubt Germaine, in Sweden, as has been
suggested by Kurt Kloocke?^14 Constant had been politically inactive for so
long: he knew that such an opportunity, if it came, was unlikely to present
The end of an empire 217