Benjamin Constant

(sharon) #1
every means of pleasure from us. They leave us with the past to
sustain us, which is sad, and offer the prospect of a future which
will be brief. Thank you for what you say about how I have used
my life. I have not done a quarter of what I ought to have done, and
if I were not secretly very ashamed of having wasted my time and
energy, I would be proud of the good things people say about what
I have done despite that waste. But what does it matter? The grave
awaits the hard-working man just as it does the idler, awaits fame
as well as obscurity, and it is happy to close over them without
worrying about who and what it is covering up. I would like to see
you again before I am lowered into mine, but I can no longer make
plans. I see so many people dying around me who had reckoned on
having a future that I can hardly believe I’m still alive myself. I’m
working in order to leave, as they say, something behind me when
I’m gone. When I’m gone—that ‘I’, what will become of it and
what will that ‘I’ have in common with what I’ve left behind? No
matter—I’m working out of force of habit, and because time is
weighing heavily upon me. My fourth volume—the last, thank
Heaven—will be published, I think, this winter. I feel it is more
unusual, more original than the others, but sad too, because
reaching the end is always sadder than being on the journey when
one is constantly being distracted by the objects one passes.^48

Rosalie, an intelligent and devout Calvinist, replied on 18 October 1828


with a letter and two parallel texts on the theme of death, one from a


meditation on death in volume III of Constant’s De la religion and the
other her own reply. For Constant death was a dark and terrifying night


which left all of our questions unanswered and our regrets without


consolation; for Rosalie death was a release from suffering, often bringing


a sense of well-being to the person who was dying and the feeling that


separation from loved ones would not be eternal.
49
Yet all was not entirely gloom for Constant: he still had loyal friends who were very
much alive and who considered that his life had not been a failure: indeed who strongly
supported everything he was doing. One such was Sir James Mackintosh, a treasured link
with the Whig optimism of Edinburgh in the 1780s. The bond formed between them then
had never been broken, despite many years of separation. While waiting in Liège in
March 1814 for Bernadotte’s fate to be decided, Constant had written an important and
little-known letter to Mackintosh which was printed in Mackintosh’s Memoirs and
written, it seems, in English. In it he set out his political credo, which at that time was
governed by ‘the necessity of overturning the most systematical and baneful tyranny, that
ever weighed, with iron weight, on mankind’, that of Napoleon. He continued, referring
to the recently published De l’esprit de conquête:


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