her family, virtually kidnapping her; that he had given her a good
education—this included the usual accomplishments plus an
understanding of the running of a country estate—his plan being that she
would eventually take charge of his estates; that subsequently she appears
to have become Juste’s mistress; and that they later married in secret at
some unknown date.^46 The whole extraordinary story, which exemplifies
as well as anything the stubborn wilfulness of Juste, had begun in 1761,
long before his marriage to Henriette de Chandieu. His nephew, Charles
de Constant, describes how it happened in a letter to his sister Rosalie:
It was pure chance that made my uncle take Marianne, an argument
about education with my aunt, Madame de Charrière [de Bavois]
who mentioned a very intelligent little girl at Bettens to him; my
grandmother never forgave him for what he did. When he married
[Henriette de Chandieu], the Chandieu family demanded that
[Marianne] be put in an out-of-the-way place so that she would
never reappear on the scene. This was done. But when he became a
widower so soon afterwards this cancelled the agreement. Life is
often more the result of the circumstances we find ourselves in than
of our calculations. I always believed Marianne was simply
unfortunate and not a guilty party in all of what happened.^47Thus, even before his son was born, Juste had prepared the ground for yet
another unhappy relationship in Benjamin’s life. There is no evidence that
Marianne had yet become Juste’s mistress before his marriage to Henriette
de Chandieu, although it is not impossible. And it is certain that Juste’s
grief for his wife’s death was genuine and long-lasting: like his son in later
life, Juste was perfectly capable of loving two women passionately at the
same time. However, when Marianne became Constant’s full-time
guardian in 1772 she was 20 years of age. We know the date of a promise
of marriage which Juste signed—22 July 1772—and there exists a
marriage contract dated Dijon, 11 January 1792: Marianne may possibly
have married him secretly in 1792.
48
She bore Juste a son, Charles de
Rebecque in 1784 and a daughter, Louise de Rebecque, later Baroness
d’Estournelles, in 1792. Now the strangest part of the whole story is that
Constant, an exceptionally alert and receptive child, remained in total
ignorance of Marianne’s real status, an ignorance which outlasted his
adolescence and ended only in 1800 when, at the age of 33, his father
decided he was old enough to know the truth!
49
It is difficult to believe.
However, the structure of one’s childhood relationships is an immediate
The grief that does not speak 29