I’m dead, but as God is my witness I don’t know why. It’s a habit
of mind I’ve had since my childhood. But I can’t say I’m tempted
by what the future holds: there is virtually nothing but public and
private tribulation awaiting me.^46In fact virtually nothing but public adulation lay in store for Constant. For
he had suddenly become a much admired symbol to the rising generation
of young liberals, and achieved re-election very easily in Paris. He was
also elected for the first time in Strasbourg, which he now chose to
represent, and by mid-December 1827 was active in a new Chamber of
Deputies where Villèle’s men were in a minority.
Villèle in fact was seen as too moderate by more extreme Ultras, despite his having
achieved a naval victory at Navarino on 20 October 1827 in an expedition to help the
Greeks in their War of Independence. The Chamber was now made up of Villèle’s
government with 160 to 180 supporters; the liberal opposition with about the same, and
sixty to eighty disgruntled extreme royalists who were henceforth opposed to Villèle. The
government was clearly unable to govern, and Villèle soon resigned, in January 1828. A
stop-gap government, effectively under the leadership of Martignac, the new Minister of
the Interior, was to last for the next year and a half while Charles X looked for someone
more to his own extreme—one might say crackpot—taste. Between January and August
1828 Constant made forty-nine speeches to the Chamber which were documented in the
volumes of the Archives parlementaires.^47 The tide was at last running the way of the
liberal opposition—a curious sensation for Constant who now saw a limited degree of
liberalization being successfully forced upon Martignac’s government. When the
Chamber went into recess, Constant left Paris in August 1828 for Baden-Baden, once
again in an attempt to mend his failing health. He rested, bathed, took the waters,
gambled; crossed back into France to visit Coulmann at Brumath in September and once
again in October; and spent a month in Alsace at Munster where he appears to have
worked on the fourth volume of De la religion. Information on this period of Constant’s
life is relatively scarce, and for what we do know we have the ever suspicious Prefect
Esmangart and his spies to thank. What is beyond doubt is that in Alsace Constant was
popular and fêted wherever he went. Charlotte looked on Alsace as part of her homeland,
to her husband’s occasional embarrassment, and Constant himself was happy in its
Franco-German cultural atmosphere, while privately regretting the general
humourlessness there at times. Cultivating the electorate was therefore no real hardship
for either of them.
In November 1828 Constant was bitterly disappointed when his friend Prosper de
Barante, now a distinguished historian and diplomat, was elected to the French Academy
instead of himself. He had written despairingly to Rosalie from Baden-Baden on 18
September 1828, more and more overwhelmed by the idea of his own impending death,
something he had bravely kept at bay until now by ceaseless activity and hard work:
Yes, my dear Rosalie, the years rush by, carrying away our strength
and bringing infirmity in their wake. Little by little they take awayApotheosis 255