Benjamin Constant

EPILOGUE

Constant was a haunted man, pursued by the nightmare of death and

oblivion. Jean-Jacques Coulmann, who knew him well during the last

seven or eight years of his life, observed:

The thought of death remained one of the most indestructible and

permanent ideas in his mind. Everything brought it back to him:

pleasure and pain, fame and obscurity, gratefulness and ingratitude,

love and hate. It weakened his links with other people, it made all

his passions grow lukewarm, it made him detached from

everything. It was the ultimate reason for that indifference which

many people considered scandalous, or reproached him for,

thinking that it was the result of egoism, whereas he himself was

one of the people he was least concerned about. He knew by heart

the finest verses on death by English, German, Italian and French

poets, languages which were all equally familiar to him.^1

Edouard Laboulaye, drawing on the memories of Constant’s friends and

enemies, attempted in 1861 to suggest a solution to le cas Constant, the

enigma of his personality:

Benjamin Constant never had a mother to bring him up: in the

cutting irony which characterized his style one can tell that that

early happiness was missing from his life. During his childhood he

was unable to open his heart to anyone. The Colonel remarried a

few years after his first wife died, and by this marriage had

children, one of them a daughter for whom Benjamin always had

great affection. But, rightly or wrongly, it does not appear that the

son of the first wife felt at home in his new family. As a young

adult he speaks about it with bitterness. As a child he appears only

to have loved his grandmother. His father frightened him, and that

fear, as we shall see, had a fateful influence on the rest of his

life....^2

In the early part of this book it was my contention that the experiences of

those early childhood years for Constant—the long-term effects of losing

Epilogue 263