Adolphe

by Benjamin Constant

  ADOLPHE

  HENRI-BENJAMIN CONSTANT DE REBECQUE was born in Lausanne in 1767, and was educated privately and at the universities of Erlangen and Edinburgh. He had several liaisons with older women, including Madame de Charrières and Mme de Staël. Germaine de Staël, one of the most brilliant and influential women in Europe, maintained a powerful hold on him for years, their relationship being marked by passionate jealousies and reconciliations. When Constant’s politics incurred Napoleon’s disfavour, he shared Mme de Staël’s exile in 1803. In 1813 he published from Hanover a pamphlet attacking Napoleon, but, nevertheless, took office under Napoleon during the Hundred Days. After the second restoration, he went to London where he published Adolphe in 1816. In Adolphe Constant turned his own experience into one of the most penetrating pieces of psychological analysis of relations between man and woman. He returned to France in 1818, where he became famous as the leader of the Liberal opposition in the Chamber and as a political journalist. His Journaux intimes were not published fully until 1952; Le Cahier Rouge, containing a fascinating account of his youth, was published in 1907; and Cécile in 1931. Benjamin Constant died in Paris in 1830.

  LEONARD TANCOCK spent most of his life in or near London, apart from a year as a student in Paris, most of the Second World War in Wales and three periods in American universities as visiting professor. Until his death in 1986, he was a Fellow of University College, London, and was formerly Reader in French at the University. He prepared his first Penguin Classic in 1949 and, from that time, was extremely interested in the problems of translation about which he wrote, lectured and gave broadcasts. His numerous translations for the Penguin Classics include Zola’s Germinal, Thérèse Raquin, The Débâcle, L’Assommoir and La Bête Humaine; Diderot’s The Nun, Rameau’s Nephew and D’Alembert’s Dream; Maupassant’s Pierre and Jean; Marivaux’s Up from the Country; Prévost’s Manon Lescaut; La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims; Voltaire’s Letters on England; Madame de Sévigné’s Selected Letters and The Goncourt Journals.

  Benjamin Constant

  ADOLPHE

  TRANSLATED WITH AN INTRODUCTION

  BY LEONARD TANCOCK

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published 1816

  This translation first published 1964

  19

  This translation copyright © Leonard Tancock, 1964

  All rights reserved

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-196034-0

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Preface to the Second Edition (1816), Alexander Walker’s translation

  Preface to the Third Edition (1824)

  Note by the Publisher

  ADOLPHE

  Letter to the Publisher, and his Reply

  INTRODUCTION

  1

  THE French are a self-consciously intellectual race; they have a horror of the unexplained, they must know where they stand, and why. That is why they are penetrating critics, of themselves as well as of others, and unsatisfactory politicians, for politics are not rational, but empirical and opportunist. It is also why the most typical works of French literature are works which plumb the depths of the human character, its passions, its motives, and expose the myriad shifts and disguises of its self-centredness. Whether it be Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, or Gide, clear self-knowledge is the aim. And because that is more important than anything else, the characteristic French masterpiece (though of course the discursive Montaigne is an exception) is economical in form, avoiding all by-products or dawdling by the wayside, all merely picturesque effects, all ‘poetic’ flights put in for their own sake.

  A uniquely French expression of this ideal is the small, economical novel of uncompromising analysis of character and motive, usually autobiographical, usually dealing with a tragic love-affair, tragic because the stark facts of human nature cannot logically be worked out and death must be called in to end an impossible situation. Everything not bearing upon the main problem is ruthlessly pruned, and the result is a microcosm of the human condition. Some or all of these characteristics may be found in the miniature masterpieces which are not the least gift of France to the literature of the modern world: Manon Lescaut, René, Adolphe, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle, Dominique, La Porte étroite, La Symphonie pastorale, are only a few examples.

  Such works of fiction, often very thinly disguised autobiographies, are touchstones which reveal to which of two groups a critic, university lecturer or writer of a doctoral thesis belongs. Which group is sheep and which goats is of course a matter of opinion. The ‘scholars’ comb libraries, manuscripts, parish registers and suchlike in an endless checking of the text against the biographical facts. The ‘aesthetes’ are really only concerned with the creative processes of the artist who has utilized the purely personal and local as material to transmute into universal truth recognizable by every reader as his own actual or potential experience, his own instincts and character. These ask themselves what possible object can be achieved by niggling about names, places, and dates, while the ‘scholars’, of course’ dismiss the ‘aesthetes’ as quite unscientific generalizers, purely subjective essayists.

  The case of Benjamin Constant and Adolphe has occupied scholars and aesthetes alike for a century and a half. But the story should be a lesson in humility for the omniscient scholars and in respect for science and documents on the part of the vague aesthetes. Benjamin set out precise, detailed information about himself in three texts, apart from Adolphe, none of which was available until many years after his death and two not until very recently. The first, known as Le Cahier rouge, simply because the manuscript is in a red notebook, is a frankly autobiographical fragment of which the real title is Ma Vie, and which sets out Benjamin’s life from his birth in 1767 until 1787. This notebook passed, after the death of Benjamin’s widow, through the hands of various members of the Constant family, and was not published until 1907. The second, Cécile, probably written in 1811, had an even more delayed appearance. Benjamin led such a nomadic life that boxes of his papers were deposited here and there for years, and it seems probable that the manuscript of Cécile was left in Germany from 1813 until 1826, when he had his things moved to Lausanne. After his death in 1830 this manuscript passed with other papers into the possession of relatives, and it was not available for publication until 1951. Cécile is an account, with names transparently disguised, of Benjamin’s long and frequently interrupted courtship, if such it can be called, of Charlotte von Hardenburg, whom he met in 1793 but was not to marry, and then only secretly, until fifteen years later. The third vital text is the Journal intime, which was only known in a trun
cated and bowdlerized text until the real, unexpurgated one was published, with the family’s permission, by Alfred Roulin in 1952.

  2

  Here, from the above sources, as well as from what was publicly known in his lifetime, are the facts of the first forty years of Benjamin Constant’s life, to the time of his writing Adolphe:

  Born on 25 October 1767, at Lausanne, the son of Juste Constant de Rebecque, a professional soldier in the service of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, Benjamin lost his mother, whose first child he was, a few days after his birth. The Constant family had ramified for generations along the northern shores of the Lake of Geneva, and belonged to the well-to-do cosmopolitan Swiss class who filled higher military and professional positions all over Western Europe. Benjamin’s father, shy, distant, sarcastic, and not a little eccentric, left the upbringing of his only son to a series of incompetent, cranky, and sometimes vicious and even criminal tutors of various nationalities, whom he took on or discharged for no better reason than because he liked the look of them or had grown tired of them. One of these tutors, a Mr May, was taken on when Juste and his thirteen-year-old boy visited Oxford in 1781. Mr May and Benjamin travelled for some eighteen months together in Europe, but as from the outset Juste had encouraged his son to poke fun at his tutor, the educational value of the latter, apart from providing practice in spoken English, was not great. All the time the intellectual precocity of the boy, though undisciplined, was being nourished upon a diet of mixed reading, from works on history, religion, and philosophy to pornography, for indeed he had little else to do. In 1782, when he was under fifteen, he was entered as a student at the University of Erlangen, but by then his sexual precocity was as evident as his intellectual power, and he chose to scandalize the not easily scandalized society of eighteenth-century Germany by parading a ‘mistress’ of notoriously easy virtue, and he was recalled to Brussels by his father in May 1783. Juste’s next idea was to send the boy to Edinburgh, where he arrived in July and where he spent, as a student in the University, the two happiest and most profitable years of his youth, making many lasting friendships and cutting a brilliant figure in the Speculative Society, but also gambling heavily. He finally had to be removed because of his debts. Two sojourns in Paris between 1785 and 1787 as pupil of the distinguished critic Suard were punctuated by bouts of calf love for older women and less innocent affairs with mercenary ones. It was during these Paris days that he made the acquaintance of Mme de Charrière, the first great influence upon his life.

  Mme de Charrière, née van Zuylen (1740–1805), also known as Belle de Zuylen, was born and brought up in Holland and had married, in 1771, a Swiss gentleman who was then acting as mathematical tutor to her younger brother. She settled in her husband’s home at Colombier, near Neuchâtel, and after some ten years of boredom with her kind and attentive but uninteresting husband, sought distraction in literary work. She achieved a certain fame, notably with her Caliste (1785), after the publication of which her husband brought her to Paris in search of a cure for her chronic depression. When they met in Paris Benjamin was nineteen and she forty-six. The relationship was what might be expected. The motherless, precocious youth found in this clever, unhappy, childless woman not only a substitute for a mother, but the first person with a mind equal to his own on which he could sharpen his wits. She not only held all ordinary people in scorn, but hated all prejudice, humbug, and artificial attitudes, demanding absolute honesty with oneself. Pas de phrases was what each asked of the other. Their endless talks did not improve Benjamin’s character or way of looking at life, but they cleared his mind of cant and infinitely sharpened his self-knowledge and power of clear psychological analysis. The relationship was to continue on and off, including long stays at Colombier, through all the storms of Benjamin’s life for nearly twenty years, until her death at the end of 1805. She, of course, is the old woman to whose death Adolphe refers in the first chapter of the novel.

  Summoned to return to his father in the early summer of 1787, Benjamin ran away from Paris and spent the summer months in almost penniless wanderings in England and Scotland, begging and borrowing from various former student friends of the Edinburgh days. At twenty, rootless, cosmopolitan, speaking three languages, he was already an inveterate gambler and womanizer, but also of an extremely studious nature, already deeply interested in the philosophy and comparative religion which he was to regard as his main work throughout his life, and never more happy than when he was researching in a library.

  All this is narrated in Le Cahier rouge. In 1788 Benjamin took up his first position, that of gentleman-in-ordinary to the Duke of Brunswick, and at Brunswick, in 1789, he married Wilhelmina (Minna) von Cramm. It was a foolish marriage, destined to failure from the start. Minna was older than he, shrewish and soon unfaithful, and by 1792 all was over except the final formality of divorce, which came three years later. But meanwhile, in 1793, he had met Charlotte von Marenholz (née von Hardenburg), who was most unhappily married to a much older man who was her own sister’s lover. The long, chequered love story of Benjamin and Charlotte, which was to drag on for some fifteen years until their marriage, celebrated in absolute secrecy for fear of Mme de Staël, is told in Cécile.

  It was apparently on the road between Nyon and Coppet, in September 1794, that Benjamin Constant met his doom. She is described, as Mme de Malbée, in Cécile:

  When I met Mme de Malbée she was in her twenty-seventh year. Short rather than tall, and too full in the figure to be elegant, her features were irregular and too prominent and her complexion indifferent; she had the loveliest eyes in the world, very fine arms, hands on the large side but dazzlingly white, a magnificent bosom, quick, jerky movements, over-masculine attitudes, a very sweet voice which, when she was excited, had a singularly touching break in it – altogether a general effect which struck one unfavourably at first glance, but which, when Mme de Malbée spoke and grew animated, became irresistibly attractive. Her intellect, the most far-ranging that has ever belonged to any woman, and possibly to any man either, had, in serious discussion, more force than grace, and in what touched the emotional life, a hint of sententiousness and affectation. But in her gaiety there was a certain indefinable charm, a kind of childlike friendliness which captivated the heart and established for the moment a complete intimacy between her and whoever she was talking to…. [translation mine]

  Germaine de Staël, daughter and heiress of the wealthy financier-statesman Necker, was indeed the most brilliant and influential woman in Europe. She was also the most possessive and exhausting, a terror to friend and foe alike. Her restless existence was centred upon her father’s château at Coppet, on the Lake of Geneva, which became not only a literary factory but the storm centre of the liberal intellectual resistance to the despotism of Napoleon. In politics she represented the disappointment of eighteenth-century progressive enlightenment when the Revolution, hailed at first as the culmination of all that men of good will had worked, written, and longed for, turned, as most revolutions do, into a ruthless, immoral tyranny. In literature she was the formulator, in her two great works of criticism De la Littérature (1800) and De l’Allemagne (1810), of Romanticism as a more or less coherent doctrine, from which manifestoes later theorists, such as Stendhal and Victor Hugo, took many ideas without acknowledgement. Her novels, Delphine (1802) and Corinne (1807) portraying heroines (herself) of outstanding intellect doomed to love men unworthy of them, though almost unreadable today were sensationally successful at the time. For years at Coppet and elsewhere during her wanderings, she had about her a court of clever men including Bonstetten, Sismondi, the brothers Schlegel, Barante, and Constant, and one woman, her intimate friend, Mme Récamier, the most beautiful woman in Europe, who now and then turned the head of one or other of the men just for her own amusement, but who was cold as ice and only really interested in her own virginal loveliness.

  For years Benjamin was caught up in this extraordinary household. Life at Coppet was governed by th
e moods and caprices of its mistress. Meals were at any time, Mme de Staël swept unannounced into anybody’s room at all hours of the day or night, wearing her crimson and emerald green turban and twirling a sprig of some evergreen shrub (the gardener cut them specially each day) in order to show off her hand and arm, and she talked for hours on end, usually about some idea she was developing in her current book. Nobody was allowed any personal life of his own, and she immediately dealt with any sign of rebellion by turning on the full pressure of her remarkable histrionic gifts, with weepings, screams, swoonings, and hysterics. At first Benjamin was captivated, not only by the woman’s wonderful brain and irresistible personality, but also as a lover in the full sense of the word, following the select band of distinguished men, including Talleyrand, who had already passed that way. It is probable that Mme de Staël’s next child, Al-bertine de Staël, born in 1797, was his. Not that all the time was spent in love-making, scenes, and play-acting, for together they worked at their writing (nothing ever stopped her writing), and while she was working on her books he was producing some remarkable political pamphlets and putting in time at his hobby and life work, the history of comparative religions.

  Such intensity could not be maintained by an ordinary man, especially when Germaine’s tyranny became more and more imperious. She would allow Benjamin leave of absence only on condition that he return at a stated time, she would demand to read his letters, she was not above making scenes in public, and if he overstayed a leave of absence she would drive in her grand coach to where he was and bring him back. Humiliations would be followed by passionate reconciliations, and always Benjamin’s moral cowardice and genuine affection and pity would prevent him from making the break he constantly swore to himself to delay no longer.

  A chance came in the late autumn of 1800. While temporarily alone in Paris Benjamin met in the salon of his good friend Mme Talma, wife of the great actor, a woman about five years older than himself, known as Anna Lindsay. Anna was the daughter of an Irish innkeeper of Calais, named O’Dwyer, but, having as a child charmed the Duchesse de Fitz-James, a guest at the inn, she had been brought up amid Parisian airs and graces. At about sixteen she had left the Duchess, been ‘protected’ by various gentlemen, and had eventually become, in 1789, mistress of M. de Lamoignon, by whom she had had two children and with whom she had been living for eleven years. When she met Benjamin she was thirty-eight and he thirty-three. The affair blazed up at once into a passionate attachment and followed a familiar pattern. Poor Anna fell genuinely in love with Benjamin and was prepared to leave her lover and children to marry him, but he, the chase having ended with capture of the prey, immediately took fright at becoming too involved and began to cool, the process being accelerated when things became dangerous owing to the arrival in Paris not only of M. de Lamoignon but also of Mme de Staël. By May 1801 Anna had left Paris, broken-hearted, and Germaine resumed her sway, soon asserting her authority by taking him with her for a protracted tour of Germany in search of material for her projected book on German thought and literature. There Mme de Staël terrified everybody by her merciless interrogations. The story is told that at Weimar, Goethe was so worn out that he decided to take to his bed with a diplomatic illness from which he did not recover until sure that she had left the town. However that may be, Benjamin Constant seems to have been a success with the great man.