in order to exhaust himself, in the hope, as he put it, that he would no longer be able to
bear a woman’s touch, but to little avail.^43 He knew that his love for this enigmatic
woman who so often appeared to him hard and frivolous was both absurd and self-
destructive, but as with Adolphe his will was paralysed and rational knowledge could do
little to affect his feelings or actions. On 17 October 1814 he confided in his journal:
Oh God, I give up. She has put me through another appalling day.
She is a linnet, a cloud, without memory, discernment or
preferences. Her beauty has made her the object of many homages
from men, and all the romantic talk she has listened to has given
her the appearance of having feelings but in fact that is purely
superficial. The next day she is never as she had been the day
before. Her memory is not good enough when she has had one
enjoyable conversation for her to want to seek another. She is the
same with everyone as she is with me.^44As the year came to an end his extravagances prompted him to write in his
diary on New Year’s Eve: ‘I must think carefully and lead a sensible life. I
am so tired and so unhappy because of all my follies. I must get a grip on
myself, it is high time that I did.’^45 But 1815 was to prove a still more
disastrous year for him.
Despite the late nights which were always bad for his health, despite the gambling, the
obsession with Madame Récamier and his endlessly postponed departure for Germany,
on 13 December Constant began a pamphlet which was to earn him respect: on the
responsibility—and answerability—of government ministers. But all the consideration
and praise in the world meant little if it did not also come from Juliette Récamier, and
that was never to be. On 23 and 31 January 1815 he gave two public readings in Paris
salons of the novel that was soon to be called Adolphe, on the second occasion with great
success,^46 yet still his ambitions lay elsewhere, above all in politics. In that particular area
he could be certain of receiving no help whatsoever from Germaine de Staël who not
only deeply resented the fact that the man who had publicly rejected her was now
pursuing her closest woman friend, but was also demanding money from him—no less
than 40,000 francs—as a contribution to Albertine’s dowry on her marriage to Victor de
Broglie. Fate—in the form of major political developments—was shortly to step in once
again and spare Constant the penury that such a claim might have reduced him to. But he
was soon to lose something more precious than money—the hard-earned reputation
resulting from his many years of steadfast opposition to Napoleon’s tyranny.
On 1 March 1815 Napoleon landed at Fréjus with 1,050 troops, having made good his
escape from the isle of Elba and slipped past the British navy. He marched north,
gathering support as he went. There was general dissatisfaction with the Bourbon King,
there were even stirrings of the old revolutionary spirit which the young Bonaparte had
capitalized on in his early days. Word of the landing reached Constant in Paris on 6
March. For days as Napoleon moved nearer—Grenoble, Lyon, Autun, Auxerre—the
government dithered. On 8 March Constant wrote a stirring denunciation of the ex-
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