precocious intellect. For his part, the solitary boy became more and
more attached to this older girl who understood him so well and
had so much affection for him. She became the tenderest and most
devoted of sisters to him.^57In 1782 Constant was 14 years of age, Rosalie 23. It is not inconceivable
that at such an age Constant felt a kind of calf-love for his cousin of which
he was ashamed, but which experience of the world and relationships with
other women helped him to overcome. This is, at least, one of the possible
inferences to be drawn from the Lettres de d’Arsillé fils, the unfinished
autobiographical novel which Constant was later to write in collaboration
with Isabelle de Charrière. But there is no evidence of this elsewhere, and
it remains pure speculation.
There can be no doubt about the young Constant’s quickness of mind or his ability to
amuse and charm: no doubt either about his being a conceited little monster with a
violent temper. At the age of 6 or 7, while directing a playlet with his cousins Wilhelm
and Angletine de Charrière de Sévery and demonstrating to them all the tones of voice
that were needed, he had shocked Angletine by hitting her for the inadequacy of her
acting. As Angletine’s mother wrote in a letter: ‘One has to applaud Benjamin
continually, otherwise he’s not happy. It’s less he himself than his father who hopes for
applause.’^58
Constant showed early talent as a witty, sophisticated, allusive writer of letters, as
shown by those that have survived to his father, to his cousin Wilhelm de Charrière de
Sévery, and above all to his paternal grandmother, ‘la Générale’, from whom he had
unwillingly found himself separated since his father’s decision to put him in the care of
Marianne in 1772. As C.P.Courtney has rightly observed: ‘Benjamin’s childhood letters
to his grandmother, which are desperate cries for affection, take on an extra dimension if
they are read against the deplorable family background.’^59 For the anger and hostility that
‘la Générale’ felt about Juste’s behaviour had even extended to Benjamin, even though
grandmother and grandson still loved each other very much. Nonetheless Benjamin’s
letters are a delight, and the boy clearly felt confident enough even to allow himself what
seems to be a degree of sexual innuendo when writing to his ‘chere et excellentissime
Grandmere’ on 19 November 1779. He told her that when playing the harpsichord—he
was a talented keyboard player—his largos and adagios always finished up as
prestissimos, and his minuets ended in some frisking about: ‘an incurable affliction, and
impervious to reason’, he added tongue in cheek.^60
Constant cannot long have remained ignorant about sexual matters. Leaving aside his
professed unawareness of Marianne’s role in his father’s life, we have his account in Ma
Vie of what followed the two years he spent under Marianne’s tutelage. When he was 7,
in 1774, his father, anxious to obtain the maximum profit from Benjamin’s intellectual
precocity, took him to Brussels and began supervising his education himself. But Juste
was no teacher. As he said in a letter to Marianne a year or so before: ‘I have too much of
a temper and not enough patience to bring up a child properly.’^61 He therefore entrusted
Benjamin in 1775 to a surgeon in his own regiment, a Monsieur de La Grange, who was
The grief that does not speak 33