Benjamin Constant

worth which added greatly to the force of her observations. In later life Constant would
express his appreciation of his ‘chère cousine’ in the following terms:

Seeing you and talking to you is one of the greatest pleasures in my

life. If you don’t always approve of what I do, you understand what

I say, and the latter compensates me a little for the former. I say ‘a

little’ because I would like to do only those things that you approve

of. But it’s already a rare piece of good fortune to be understood.

The intellect alone is not enough to understand someone, the heart

has to be involved too, and that is why one is only understood by

those one loves and by whom one is loved.^56

That ability to understand Constant was to prove a very mixed blessing

indeed for Rosalie, as it would later be for Isabelle de Charrière.
Nevertheless there is no doubt at all that from the first they loved each

other as younger brother and older sister. Rosalie was generous in

maternal affection, Benjamin was starved of that mothering: he was lively

and extrovert, she was shy: they complemented each other perfectly.

Moreover by the time Benjamin and Rosalie first knew each other they
had both lost their natural mother, as we have seen, a loss which certainly

reinforced their attachment to each other. They cannot have seen one

another very often—Rosalie lived in Geneva, Benjamin in or near

Lausanne—but Rosalie was always a fixed and stable point in Constant’s

life when so many other relationships were both unsettled and unsettling.
From the age of 12 Benjamin saw Rosalie more frequently and they

corresponded. That correspondence was interrupted by Constant for four

years, from 1782 to 1786, during the time he spent studying in Erlangen

and Edinburgh. Although hurt by her cousin’s silence, Rosalie resumed

their exchange of letters which continued thereafter until Constant’s death
in 1830.
We shall return later to the relationship between Constant and Rosalie. There does
however appear to be something of mystery surrounding the absence of correspondence
between them from 1782 to 1786. The collection of letters published in 1955 by Alfred
and Suzanne Roulin begins with a letter from Constant dated 19 March 1786, at which
time relations between Constant and his uncle’s family were strained because of
Constant’s impossible behaviour: he had succeeded in annoying almost everybody by his
vanity and cutting humour. But it is the silence that precedes this letter of March 1786
which is so puzzling, given what we know of Constant’s affection for Rosalie. From 1780
to 1782, as Alfred Roulin says:

[Rosalie] was to see her young cousin, the mischievous Benjamin

more often, and appreciate still more the liveliness and charm of his

Benjamin constant 32