references to Marianne, and a sense of being abandoned yet again when Constant learned
of—or suspected—the nature of Marianne’s relationship with his father. One could add
that according to the Freudian principle of Verneinung—denial, the absence of a thing
implies desire for it. And Marianne Magnin is totally and inexplicably absent from Ma
Vie. But there were other important factors involved in Constant’s feelings about
Marianne, of which the most notable was money. Marianne succeeded over the years in
diverting a large proportion of Juste de Constant’s remaining wealth away from Benjamin
and towards herself and her children. If we are to believe Gustave Rudler, Benjamin
Constant inherited from his Chandieu ancestors an acute concern about money matters,^52
and his fury at seeing his own birthright constantly dwindling is not hard to imagine.
Before Juste died in 1812 Marianne had, understandably, made every effort to safeguard
her own children’s future, but had considerably worsened his relationship with Benjamin.
Benjamin’s future prospects were in jeopardy, and the stresses and strains this imposed
on him should not be underestimated. But the other factor involved was, no doubt,
Constant’s abiding fear of losing the love of his father to someone else or to someone
else’s children. All this, of course, happened long after 1772–4. Whatever the truth or
otherwise of the theory of a redirected Oedipus complex, Constant’s situation must have
felt one of total isolation. As Sir Harold Nicolson vividly puts it, he was a
lonely little boy of six years old, interned at La Maladière under the
guard of a woman whom he already much disliked. A perplexed,
vivacious, clever little boy with red hair, whose disconcerting
father was absent for months on end among the small garrison
towns of the Low Countries.^53This gloomy picture is undoubtedly an accurate one.
The young Benjamin Constant found real affection and, when he needed it, a reliable
source of sharp and unsparing criticism in his cousin Rosalie de Constant (1758–1834).
She was the daughter of Juste’s younger brother, Samuel de Constant (1729–1800), a
man very different in character from Juste. Gifted with some literary talent as a
sentimental novelist, but reserved and lacking in confidence, and somewhat too thin-
skinned and sensitive to cope with the misfortunes life heaped upon him, Samuel lost
both his dearest brother Germain-Philippe (1724–56) and his wife Charlotte, neé Pictet
(1734–66), through illness. This second death left him with four children to bring up on a
very modest income.^54 Already having herself known a tyrannical grandmother,
Marguerite Pictet (1734–66), at the age of 8 Rosalie, with her sister Lisette and her
brothers Juste and Charles, found herself without a mother. Rosalie was a hunchback, the
result of a childhood fall in which she had dislocated her shoulder, and she was short-
sighted into the bargain. But this did nothing to sour her good nature.^55 In a family
marked by extremes of diffidence and indecisiveness on the one hand and of stiff-necked
authoritarianism on the other Rosalie was an exemplar of reasonableness and clear
thinking. In her friendship with her cousin Benjamin, who was nine years her junior, she
could be relied on for her unsentimental kindness and support as well as for needle-sharp
home truths about his character and behaviour. She had a Calvinist’s unswerving respect
for the truth, however uncomfortable that was at times, but also a modesty about her own
The grief that does not speak 31