Benjamin Constant

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French people on 4 June 1814. In the hope of being noticed Constant


wrote a pamphlet of a general kind on the basic principles of constitutional


monarchy à l’anglaise—a free press, religious toleration, and so forth. He
did attract attention, that of the government censor who indicated to him


firmly that he should write nothing about the contents of the Charter—if


indeed the monarch was gracious enough to grant one—either before or


after it was made public. Comment of any kind was unwelcome. Constant


therefore fired off two more squibs, on the freedom of pamphlets and
newspapers and on a speech made by the Minister of the Interior, in which


he boldly attacked the imposition of limits on freedom of expression.^34 At


last people began to register that he was back on the scene. In the


meantime he had become associated with François-Jean-Frédéric Durbach


(1763–1827), deputy for the Moselle, who was hostile to the Bourbon
royal family and for whom Constant began to write speeches on the liberty


of the press. But this was hardly enough for a former member of the


Tribunate, a man who desperately wanted to write and deliver his own


speeches and to be at the centre of political controversy.
During the spring and summer of 1814 Constant was frequently without any word
from Charlotte. There was depressing news from Göttingen where his friend Charles de
Villers had been unjustly stripped by the Allies of his Professorship of French Literature
which had been given him by the Napoleonic puppet Kingdom of Westphalia (Villers
was to die the following year), and then on 3 June he heard that his dearly loved aunt, the
Comtesse Anne de Nassau had died the week before. She left him very little in her will,
and now both Madame de Staël and his half-brother and half-sister (he took to calling the
last two ‘the bastards’ in his diary) wanted money from him. With his morale and self-
esteem at their nadir he wrote on 17 July 1814:


Miserable morning. I shall never be anything in this country if I do
not succeed by way of its government, and that is no easy matter. I
must devote my whole mind to it. Letter from Charlotte. She is not
coming [to Paris]. I must become somebody in the next six weeks.
Dined at Madame Récamier’s.^35

That last phrase marks the beginning of perhaps the last genuinely grand


passion in Constant’s life. He was now 46 and had known Juliette
Récamier (1777–1849) for many years. She had been Germaine’s close


friend at Coppet, and a friend of his too, though he had never really taken


a great deal of notice of her. After all, despite her extraordinary beauty and


grace, immortalized by the painters Gérard and Jacques-Louis David, she


was not particularly intelligent when seen by the side of Madame de Staël,
and had always appeared rather insipid and devoid of interest. While the


The end of an empire 223
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