expression in Dickens’s recollection of the time he was set to work in
Warren’s Blacking Factory:
No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into
this companionship; compared these every day associates with
those of my happier childhood; and felt my early hopes of growing
up to be a learned and distinguished man, crushed in my breast.
The deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected
and hopeless...cannot be written. My whole nature was so
penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations,
that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my
dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man;
and wander desolately back to that time of my life.^23The appalling fate of Ann Hurle and the treatment of the 5-year-old
Benjamin Constant at the hands of his tutor, these two stories told by the
older Constant seem to point to a single possibility: that in the years that
are of such crucial importance in the development of a personality, in the
first five years of one’s life and beyond, Constant felt unloved and
abandoned. And, as is too often the case, he perhaps never escaped
completely from the tyranny of that deprivation. Although the evidence
that can be now gathered about those years of Constant’s life may be scant
and although Constant himself maintains a strict silence on the subject (a
silence which is probably itself eloquent), there is an irrefragable logic in
the pattern of his later attitudes and responses that brings us back again
and again to early unhappiness. Let us recapitulate the essential features of
Constant’s first years: he lost his mother shortly after his birth; his father,
despite remarrying later, was deeply and permanently scarred by
Henriette’s death, and, as Rosalie de Constant, Benjamin’s cousin, records
in her Cahiers verts, speaking of Juste de Constant: ‘Ce malheur a influé
sur tout le reste de son temps’, ‘this misfortune influenced the rest of his
life’.^24 She adds: ‘His son’s upbringing caused him a great deal of
tribulation: he [Juste] was clearly affected by the misfortune of having lost
his mother’.
25
Even without having such a burden to carry, Juste was
already noted for his ironic detachment from those around him, as well as
for his vanity and general aloofness; he was also secretive and devious,
moody, impulsive, liable to change his attitudes and opinions from one
minute to the next, unable to show affection, prone to using sarcasm to
indicate his displeasure.
Benjamin constant 20