Writing some fifty years nearer to Benjamin Constant’s lifetime than Gustave Rudler,
and drawing on the personal memories of Constant’s contemporaries, Edouard Laboulaye
records in 1861 that Constant never knew the love of a mother and was unable to find
that warmth in his relationship with Juste. On the subject of his father’s second marriage
and family, Laboulaye implies that Benjamin felt excluded and distanced as a result of it,
and that his unsatisfactory relationship with the irascible and overbearing Colonel, in
which there was always an element of fear, influenced the whole course of his life.^86
There can be no doubt that the young Benjamin Constant’s troubled relationship with his
father did indeed set the framework for the rest of his life and affected in some way all of
his subsequent activities, attitudes and friendships. The experience of rejection which I
have suggested he felt in his earliest years came not only from the loss of his mother (a
fact on which he must have brooded as soon as he became aware of it), but also from the
severing or disruption of so many of his ties with the living: with his paternal
grandmother and with his nurse at the age of 5, and with his father, so often leaving him
to rejoin his regiment on the other side of Europe. Fear of rejection leads to fear of love
itself, and there can be little wonder at the ambivalence of Constant when offered love in
later life. To this can be added the anguish which is always associated with partings in his
work: separation was what had permanently threatened his childhood existence,
beginning with that first brutal and inexplicable separation from his mother about which
he had been told, and constantly repeated with a thousand more or less painful variations.
Parting carried with it an undefined menace—that of being possibly final.
Fear of rejection, fear of separation: there was enough there to make for a childhood of
more than average misery. But to have Juste de Constant as a father, with his
aggressiveness, his propensity for cutting sarcasm and his limitless desire for his son’s
literary glory, this surely was misfortune on a grand scale. And yet somewhere and
somehow Benjamin did find a little love, the proof being that in the end he was able to
love and cherish at least his second wife Charlotte and to accept her rather maternal love
in return. He was also capable of great and lasting loyalty to his friends. But the residue
of these early, dark, often lonely years was also there, poisoning his hopes and ambitions
and infecting his relationships. He was anxious, depressive and throughout his life
overwhelmingly obsessed with the idea of death, perhaps secretly guilty and self-
reproachful for having survived his mother. His friend Jean-Jacques Coulmann observed
that the ever-present thought of death blighted Constant’s whole existence, affected all
his relationships and made him seem offensively indifferent to people.^87 Certainly
Constant’s sense of futility amounting perhaps to a questioning of his right to be alive at
all could well have come from an early bond with a substitute mother having been
severed. In the view of Ian Suttie a person’s relationship with his or her mother is a
socializing one and one which gives us a sense of ourselves and of our worth. With
Constant such serene self-acceptance came late if it came at all, and his persistent
tendency, especially in his youth, to self-destructive behaviour could well have originated
in an early experience of rejection. Insecure, sometimes unable to see himself as loved or
lovable, unable to identify entirely with an aggressive and domineering father, it would
not have been surprising if Constant had been drawn to a number of forms of sexual
deviation. A feeling of guilt and inferiority perhaps produced the sado-masochistic scene
which opens Ma Vie, either in reality at the age of 5 or as a fantasy in the mind of the 44-
year-old writer. It could also have produced a bisexual identification which may not only
The grief that does not speak 41