their own ways and their relationship must end. According to Ma Vie, Madame Johannot
took the initiative of nipping in the bud the young Constant’s attempt to carry on their
correspondence after he had left Brussels: she did not reply to his first letter. She left with
him an indelible and bitter-sweet memory, most of all because she had been so
exceptionally unpossessive and undemanding. Almost uniquely in his life she was a
woman who respected—perhaps more even than he yet did himself—his need to be free
and under no obligations towards her. It was she too who, knowing of Juste’s intention of
taking his son away from Brussels at the end of 1785, forestalled that irresoluteness
which would later bedevil all Constant’s relationships with women. Her suffering did not
make her vulnerably passive: she did what was necessary to prevent that suffering from
lasting indefinitely into the future.
From an intellectual point of view Constant’s stay in Brussels was a significant one.
As we have seen in the previous chapter, it was there that the idea of writing a history of
polytheism first took shape in his mind. According to Philippe Secretan (1756–1826), a
Swiss tutor whom Juste de Constant had recommended to the Duke of Ursel for the
Duke’s son, and who acted as a mentor to Benjamin Constant in Brussels from August to
November 1785, Benjamin spent much of his time plunged in abstruse metaphysics,
again a continuation of his interests and those of his Edinburgh friends earlier in the year.
Secretan insisted on taking him out into society, to the theatre and to meet members of
the Genevan colony in Brussels, as he records in his Souvenirs:
He had agreeable talents and uncommon erudition, as well as
considerable wit. Apart from that, I had the impression that his
ideas were in a state of great disorder. I tried to rescue him from the
depths of metaphysics and transcendental philosophy into which he
enjoyed plunging, and which did not do his health any good.^18At the same time Constant was in the grip of a renewed enthusiasm for
Helvétius whom he had also read and admired while still at Edinburgh, as
is perhaps suggested in John Wilde’s Character of H.B.Constant. He went
as far as lending Madame Johannot a copy of De l’esprit (Concerning the
mind), who sent it back saying: ‘I am returning the book about the mind;
my own has been too preoccupied to read it.’
19
It is likely that the
philosophe coterie that met at Jean-Baptiste Suard’s Paris house had once
again reinforced the dogmatically materialist and atheistic cast of mind in
Constant from which in the long run only his later exhaustive study of
ancient religions—and no doubt also greater experience of life—would
release him. By a strange irony it was, according to Ma Vie, a statement by
Helvétius in De l’esprit to the effect that pagan religion was preferable to
Christianity that led by a long and roundabout route not only to his
writings on religion which were to become the only interest and
consolation in his life, as he was frequently to remark in his letters and
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