remained proud of the work he had done on the ‘Additional Act’. It had been a genuine
effort to ensure that the Emperor became a constitutional monarch and its intention was
to guard against a return of his despotic tendencies. To answer those who accused him of
being without principle in politics Constant drew on his manuscript treatise written in
1806 and published in late May 1815, Principes de politique, ‘Political principles
applicable to all representative governments and particularly to the present constitution of
France’.^54 Of course no instant conversion of the former tyrant could be guaranteed, but
at least Constant could feel that he was on the side of right. It looked like a gamble worth
taking.
The gamble failed and, as so often, Constant lost heavily. On 18 June 1815 Napoleon
was defeated by Blücher and Wellington at Waterloo, his ‘Hundred Days’ of power were
soon to be over. He asked to see Constant on 21 June who noted in his journal: ‘He is still
calm and making jokes. He will abdicate tomorrow, I think. The wretches, they served
him with enthusiasm when he crushed liberty, they are abandoning him when he is
establishing it.’^55 All of Constant’s plans for personal, religious and press freedoms in
France were now destined to come to nothing. Whether Napoleon would have honoured
the liberal Acte additionnel is open to doubt—Constant himself was uncertain. But
having taken the risk of collaboration, he now faced the consequences. At the end of June
and the beginning of July 1815 he went to eastern France as part of a delegation
representing the defeated Emperor’s administration: their mission was to negotiate with
the Allies. On his return to Paris he wrote a memoir defending his conduct under
Napoleon and sent it to Louis XVIII: it convinced the King who thereupon had
Constant’s name struck off the list of those—including several of Constant’s friends such
as Durbach—being punished with exile from France. On 10 August he then began a
longer version of his apologia, a ‘history of these past three months’ which was
eventually to culminate in his celebrated Mémoires sur les Cent-Jours (Memoirs
concerning the Hundred Days).^56
All this time, during all the upheaval since March, Constant’s passion for Juliette
Récamier had continued to burn fiercely. He was frequently irritable and touchy, and
ready to fight duels over her as we have seen. The new government proved to be as
reactionary and vengeful as Constant had feared it would be, but Madame Récamier kept
him in Paris when wisdom dictated that he should leave France altogether. In September
1815 Madame de Krüdener (1764–1824), the novelist and celebrated Pietistic mystic of
Russian origin, came into contact with Madame Récamier and Constant. He liked the
simple basis of Madame de Krüdener’s beliefs—which were not far removed from his
own since his encounter with the Lausanne Mystiques of 1807—although he found their
expression sometimes embarrassing and absurd.^57 Seeing Constant’s hopeless and near-
suicidal pining for Juliette, Madame de Krüdener took pity on him and offered to try to
forge a ‘spiritual bond’, a ‘lien d’âme’, between him and Madame Récamier. He began
praying with Juliette, on 4 October wrote her a religious letter, and even gave money to
the poor like a latter-day Valmont—but all in vain. As always with a man as complex as
Constant these were not simply the actions of a roué who has gone through a simulacrum
of conversion in order to be a more successful seducer: his religious aspirations, though
vague, were now nevertheless genuine. By 31 October, however, the political situation
had deteriorated to such an extent that he reluctantly bade Madame Récamier farewell
and began a period of self-imposed exile in Brussels. There he continued to give
Benjamin constant 228