itself twice. There is no firm evidence, however, and naturally Constant
would not mention anything so dangerously seditious in a journal.
Sedition of a literary kind was, however, on his mind. On 15 March 1813 Constant
began a poem, an allegorical anti-Napoleonic satire Le Siège de Soissons (The Siege of
Soissons). Although the verse is mediocre—as he himself implies on 23 March in his
diary, he no longer had Germaine’s excellent critical judgement to guide him^15 —it shows
that Constant’s thoughts were beginning to return to both politics and literature after his
long sojourn in the realm of history and theology. On 7 and 25 March he ‘read [his]
novel’^16 (it is not clear whether this was aloud to friends in Kassel or alone), and waited
as parties of Russian cossacks crossed the Elbe in the wake of the French retreat. In one
of her rare letters to survive the destruction of her correspondence with Constant,
Madame de Staël wrote from Stockholm on 17 April 1813, as if intuiting his discontent
with himself:
What I cannot understand is how it can be that your love for
literature has not manifested itself sooner and why indeed it is not
showing itself now. I am not talking about myself but you. How
can you not be tempted by the Doxat [i.e. England and the English,
from the name of her bankers Messrs Doxat and Divett of
London]? And what are you actually doing with your rare genius?
You lack decisiveness. Since I found mine, I’m better for it.^17The letter took months to reach him. All that summer Constant worked
and hoped that if Napoleon were deposed he could be in Paris by the end
of the year and perhaps even able to publish part of his Polythéisme.
Germaine left Stockholm for London on 9 June 1813, Schlegel and her
son Albert de Staël having joined Bernadotte’s Swedish forces now
moving south against the French. Tragically Albert was to be killed in a
duel on 12 July: communications now having become extremely difficult
through opposing armies, Constant was for a long time unaware of what
had happened.
A family visit which Charlotte now made with him north to Brunswick on 19
September 1813 put Constant—either by chance or design—within striking distance of
Bernadotte’s forces. On 20 September the couple began a five-week stay at the Von
Marenholtz family residence of Groß Schwülper, 7 miles outside the city of Brunswick,
with Charlotte’s son Wilhelm who was the heir to his father’s estate.^18 As the opposing
armies gained and lost ground successively, Constant worked on his manuscripts on
religion and continued to bide his time, confessing in his diary on 2 October, ‘I am
agitated by foolish ambition once again’.^19 General Chernychev and his cossacks passed
through Brunswick during the build-up to the battle of Leipzig (17–19 October 1813) in
which Napoleon was decisively defeated by the armies of the coalition. Word of the
Allied victory reached Brunswick on 25 October, and on 2 November Constant made his
Benjamin constant 218