to one’s last breath;^43 that people ought, even in extremis, to live out their
political convictions. And yet it is hard to resist the suspicion that
Constant’s lifelong preoccupation with the deaths of women he knew and
his dwelling at such length on the details of their decline and agony had
roots that plunged very deep indeed in his experiences and personality.
With that suspicion goes a feeling that the fascination was for Constant
morbidly voyeuristic and at the same time sprang from a horrified
sympathy amounting almost to identification with the sufferer. We do not
have to accept every jot and tittle of the Freudian Law in order to find
Verhoeff’s explanation of Constant’s ambivalent attitude to the dying Julie
Talma plausible:
Aggression here is in the observer’s gaze. The eager fascination
with which he contemplates the suffering and death of this woman
who is older than him also looks like revenge. This time he doesn’t
want to miss the event, as he did when his mother died. He is there,
and behind his genuine grief is also felt an obscure sense of
satisfaction.^44So far in this chapter we have dwelt at some length on Constant’s possible
response to the death of his mother and the difficulties in his relationship
with his father. Such problems were made worse by Juste’s bad choice of
tutors for his son, of which Ströhlin was only the first. But Juste had
another plan for his son’s future which would have equally far-reaching
consequences. In 1772 when Benjamin was 4 years old his paternal
grandmother, ‘la Générale’ Constant, asked to be allowed to bring him up.
Juste refused and instead put him in the care of a young woman of 20 by
the name of Jeanne-Suzanne-Marie Magnin (1752–1820), known as
Marianne Magnin. Benjamin was taken away from his grandmother for
whom he had real affection, and away from whatever nurse she or Juste
had entrusted him to, and sent to live with Marianne, a person he hardly
knew, at the house of Pastor Samuel-Benjamin Perey (1726–89) at
Cuarnens, on the outskirts of Lausanne. (Later Benjamin lived with her at
La Maladière, a property Juste de Constant had acquired in 1764, where he
had a large house built in 1771–2, and to which he later gave the name ‘Le
Désert’.
45
) If we are to believe Constant himself, he did not realize until
much later in life the truth about Marianne: that, when she was a peasant
girl of 9, Juste de Constant had taken a liking to her and, partly goaded
into the deed by an argument with his relatives, had taken her away from
Benjamin constant 28