Yet another chance of escape came in the spring of 1804, when Mme de Staël passed on her triumphal way from Weimar to Berlin and Benjamin went back alone to Lausanne. But this time it was his character that brought him back to her. He arrived at Lausanne on the 7th of April, and on the 9th, Necker, Germaine’s father, died at Coppet. Immediately Benjamin was overcome with pity and anxiety and left at once for Germany to comfort Germaine in her grief and loneliness. He was more firmly tied than ever.
And so the situation dragged on. His diary records more and more appalling scenes, more and more vows to break with the tyrant, more and more cowardly surrenders. And then, out of the blue, Charlotte came back into his life. They saw each other at the end of 1804 after eleven years of separation. She had divorced Marenholz and married again in 1798, her second husband being a Frenchman, M. du Tertre. The revival of this old love after all these years turned the stormy, uncomfortable existence with Mme de Staël into an intolerable hell. In October 1806 he was with Mme de Staël at Rouen. On the 18th he left for Paris. The following extracts from the Journal intime tell the story and show up Benjamin’s peculiar blend of passion and cold-blooded analysis (in the numerical code 1 = sexual pleasure, 12 = love for Charlotte) :
19th…. visited Mme du Tertre. She is much improved in looks. I think I have begun to make my meaning clear. If so, we are well away for 12. Dined with Prosper [de Barante]. I mean this evening to go as far as possible with Charlotte. I will write down the result tomorrow. Wrote this evening to Mme de Staël [italics Constant’s].
20th. Charlotte has yielded. Consequently 1. Afterwards I did what I could to calm her. Hope I have succeeded.… Wrote to Mme de Staël. Dined at Charlotte’s. I. for the second time. This time no doubt whatever…
21st. Letter from Mme de Staël: She is plaguing me about returning and won’t even allow me time to finish my jobs.
25th. Today I enter my fortieth year. Fugaces labuntur anni…
26th. Day of madness. Delirium of love. What the devil does it mean ? It is ten years since I have felt anything like this… I want Charlotte, I want her at all costs…
But the ‘delirium’ could only last three days longer, for he had to return to Rouen on the 29th. In this mood of desperation, reawakened passion, consciousness of advancing years, and time flying, he wrote in the diary on the 30th:
Letter from Charlotte. Nowhere else could I find such deep and sweet affection. How many years of happiness lost, even if I recover what I have so foolishly thrown away! Wrote to Charlotte. Began a novel which will be our story. Any other work would be out of the question. Boring evening. Scenes. The fault is mine; I must do as little harm as possible. Alas! I am all too clearly doomed to do so some day.
3
But this ‘novel’ was not Adolphe. How could a novel ‘which will be our story’ possibly be Adolphe? But early editions of the diary, and even Jean Mistler in 1945 (quoted by Harold Nicolson in his book in 1949), give this vital entry not only for a different date but as ‘a novel which will be my own story’. The proper text was not published until 1952, by Alfred Roulin, and it is the one given in the Pléiade edition of Constant’s works. Hence all the confusion. Generations of commentators and critics have assumed that this quotation was all that needed to be said about the genesis of Adolphe.
But there is a little more. Benjamin worked on for some days with his mind full of Charlotte, but then, on the 10th of November, comes this entry:
… Got on with my episode of Ellenore. I greatly doubt whether I have enough perseverance to finish the novel…
The ‘novel’ is already distinct from the ‘episode’, and already Benjamin is thinking of dealing with the episode separately. Two days later, on the 12th:
… Read my episode in the evening. I think it is very touching, but I shall have a job to go on with the novel.
And on the 14th:
… My episode is nearly finished. My eyes are going wrong with writing at night…
After an interruption of some days spent in travelling he writes on the 1st of December:
Worked a little at my novel, which bores me.
And on the 21st:
Worked at my novel. When I have done the two chapters which join on to the story and death of Ellenore I shall leave it at that.
The last mention of the novel is on 31st of December, after which the full-scale novel, of which the Ellenore episode was to be a part, seems to have been abandoned. References many years later to reading his novel aloud clearly mean Adolphe (the episode) more or less as we know it today.
4
The scholars mentioned earlier busied themselves for years (working on corrupt texts of the Journal and, until ten years ago, in ignorance of Cécile), pointing out the known facts about Benjamin Constant’s life and the departures there-from in Adolphe. They begin at page one and triumphantly indicate that the real Benjamin was sixteen, and not twenty-two, when he left Erlangen, and not Göttingen, and so forth, forgetting the simple and snobbish conventions of a work of fiction whereby, for instance, an Englishman might begin a novel by ‘I came down from Oxford’ rather than ‘I left Redbrick in a hurry after six months’. But art and life are different things, and the game of factual verification leads to a dead end. It is not until the novel is considered on its own merits, until it is realized that its value as a work of art and truth results from the alterations to the mere facts, from a process of simplifying, selecting, and concentrating, that the work is seen to be a masterpiece.
What are Ellenore and Adolphe? Of course the factual framework is the story of Anna Lindsay, the beautiful, ageing, foreign mistress of an aristocrat, and so is Ellenore’s submissiveness and limited intelligence. On the other hand the possessiveness, the violence, the scenes, the sending out of a search party to bring back the wandering lover, all these things are from the miserable existence of Benjamin with Mme de Staël. The magic of first love may well be an evocation of happy days with Charlotte, and so one might go on. All that matters is that Ellenore is an amalgam of Benjamin’s experience of woman, and that Adolphe, in his relationship with her, feels and behaves as do a large number of normal men. But whereas the ordinary man’s experience of what in modern jargon is called the sex-war is diluted by the preoccupations of business and family life, in Ellenore and Adolphe the essential psychological truth is isolated and intensified, as in a tragedy of Racine, by removal of all irrelevant circumstances and manipulation of essential ones in order to throw the main subject into the highest possible relief. In Ellenore the instinct of every woman to seek security, stability, normality, permanency, is intensified by her unsettled childhood and ambiguous, insecure social position. In Adolphe every man’s basic vanity, promiscuity, desire for independence, and resentment of trammels is heightened in a motherless son of a cold and distant father, whose longing for affection has never been satisfied, but who is terrified of becoming involved, and that is why he seeks out the easy and flattering conquest of an older woman socially isolated because of her irregular sexual life.
The tragedy of sexual love is that the man by his very nature pursues, wins, and immediately tires, whereas the woman, more slowly aroused, only yields when she has made up her mind. He, once his vanity and desires are satisfied, wants to pass on; she has chosen her mate for life. She tries to hold him by ties of gratitude, seeking to bind him by kindnesses, sacrifices, and forgiveness, and the more she devotes herself the more tired he is of cloying affection, the more he hates being beholden, the more ashamed he is of his own ingratitude, the more he resents being so obviously put in the wrong. Of course in most human beings these tendencies are soon submerged by marriage, children, habit, and advancing years. Were it not so, if these stabilizing influences did not exist, the end would be tragic. In Adolphe this tragic end is the only way of getting out of a psychological impasse; it is not put there simply because convention, since the days of Manon Lescaut, had demanded that heroines of novels should die in an odour of pathos, if not of sanctity.
No work of art is without a point of view, and of course that of Adolphe is masculine. That is why the hero is more lucid in his knowledge of himself than in his picture of woman. Lazy, a moral coward, but a master of self-analysis and casuistry, Adolphe uses his intelligence to get what he wants and to avoid or postpone the unpleasant consequences, using ingenious arguments to browbeat self-accusation into acquiescence, to dress up self-interest as prudence or common sense, to transform qualms of conscience into unworthy thoughts over which reason and far-sightedness triumph. He battles with his conscience, but he always wins the battle. He always has an excuse ready, even for reading, immediately after her death, a document he had sworn to Ellenore he would burn unread. Adolphe’s debates with himself and self-righteous speeches to Ellenore are miracles of self-betrayal. His character is the great achievement of the book, whereas Ellenore, being a composite figure, may be thought, however true she may be to agreed generalizations about women, to lack the consistency and unity of a supreme artistic creation. But that is for the reader to judge for himself.
5
The details of Benjamin Constant’s life after 1807 need not concern us very much. The personal complications and political activities continued, but there was a final break with Mme de Staël in 1811 (when she had fallen passionately in love with John Rocca, a handsome cavalryman over twenty years her junior, who fathered her last child, a boy born in the spring of that year, and who was to be her second husband), a certain weariness with poor Charlotte, now his wife and not as young as she had been, a hopeless passion, in his late forties, for Mme Récamier, whom he had known for many years but not thought of in that way before. Politically very involved during 1814 and the Hundred Days, when he unwisely changed sides and backed the wrong horse, after Waterloo Benjamin hastened to change back again and wrote an apologia explaining why he was now reconverted to the Bourbon cause. Louis XVIII, a tolerant man, obligingly removed Benjamin’s name from the list of Bonapartist proscriptions, but his political future looked very bleak and he decided to go on his travels again, reaching London with Charlotte in January 1816. He stayed in London for many months, moving in society and giving readings of Adolphe, which he had at last decided to publish.
The first edition appeared almost simultaneously in London and Paris in mid-June 1816. There were a few typographical differences, such as the order of the names of the publishers on the title page, but they were virtually identical.
Immediately Benjamin was embarrassed by gossip identifying various characters in the novel, and he wrote the following disclaimer to the editor of the Morning Chronicle:
SIR,
Various papers have given the public to understand that the short novel of Adolphe contains circumstances personal to me and to individuals really existing. I think it my duty to disclaim any such unwarrantable interpretation. I should have thought it foolish in me to describe myself, and surely the very judgement I passed upon the hero of that anecdote ought to have screened me from that suspicion; for no one can take pleasure in representing himself as guilty of vanity, weakness and ingratitude. But the accusation of having described any other person is much more serious. It would fix on my character a stain I can never submit to. Neither Ellenore, nor Adolphe’s father, nor the Count of P— have any resemblance to any person I have ever known. Not only my friends, but my acquaintances are sacred to me.
I am, sir, sincerely, your humble obedient servant,
B. DE CONSTANT
23 June 1816
Seriously perturbed by the persistent talk, towards the end of June he wrote a preface, destined to refute such allegations, which he would have ready for a second edition. The very existence of this second French edition was conjectural for many years, and now only four copies are known, none of which I have been able to see.
But while this was going on, an English translation was being prepared under the author’s personal supervision by Alexander Walker, his friend and formerly a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. It was finished by early July and published in London at the end of August. Walker translated the new preface, which was put at the head of the English edition together with this note of recommendation from the author:
In more than one respect, this little novel has met with unusual good fortune; for, besides the flattering approbation the original has obtained, it has also found in my friend, Mr Alexander Walker, late lecturer at Edinburgh, a translator far above the common rank of translators, and well able to gratify the public with original works, but who has condescended to apply to this small volume his profound and refined knowledge of both languages, and has thus rendered the English Adolphe completely equal to the French one.
It is Walker’s version of this interesting preface which appears at the head of the present translation, all the rest of which I have translated from the best and latest edition, that in the Bibliothéque de la Pléiade, Paris, N.R.F., 1957. The short preface to the third edition (1824), which follows it, is the one usually given in modern editions.
The ‘publisher’s’ notes at the beginning and end form part of the novel itself, and are survivals from the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century tradition whereby a novel was thought to be more credible if made to look like authentic letters or memoirs. Hence the original subtitle, often not even printed today: An anecdote found among the papers of an unknown person.
*
The Pléiade edition of the text supersedes everything else because much material was not available to earlier editors. But the edition by Gustave Rudler (Manchester University Press, 1919), although needing supplementation, remains a model of what a critical edition should be. Two biographical works in English will be found absorbingly interesting: Harold Nicolson: Benjamin Constant, London, Constable, 1949. J. Christopher Herold: Mistress to an Age. A Life of Madame de Staël, London, Hamish Hamilton, 1959. The second is one of the most remarkable books of recent years.
To say that I am grateful to my wife for her help is an understatement. Collaboration would be nearer the mark.
August 1962
LEONARD TANCOCK
PREFACE
to the Second French Edition or an essay on the character and the moral result of the work*
THE success of this little work rendering a second edition necessary, I avail myself of the circumstance to prefix to it some reflections on the character and the moral of an anecdote, on which the attention of the public confers a value which I was far from attaching to it.
I have already protested against the allusions which malignity, aspiring to the merit of penetration, has, by absurd conjectures, believed it might discover in it. If I had really given occasion for such interpretations – if there were found, in my book, a single phrase which might authorize them, I should consider myself as deserving severe reproach.
But all these pretended approximations are happily too vague, and too devoid of truth, to have made any impression. They have not, moreover, had their origin in the better classes of Society. They were the invention of those men who, not being admitted into higher circles, observe them from without, with an awkward curiosity and a wounded vanity, and seek to find, or to cause scandal, in a sphere which is above them.
Scandal is so quickly forgot, that I am perhaps wrong in speaking of it here. But I have experienced from it a painful surprize, which has rendered it necessary for me to repeat, that none of the characters traced in Adolphe has a relation to any of the individuals whom I know – that I have not wished to portray in it any one, friendly or indifferent; for, even towards these, I deem myself bound by that tacit engagement of respect and of reciprocal discretion, on which society reposes.
Besides, writers more celebrated than I am, have experienced the same fate. It has been pretended that M. de Chateaubriand has described himself in René; and the woman, who in our times, is at once the most intellectual and the best, Madame de Staël, has been suspected, not only of having depicted herself in Delphine and in Corinne, but of having traced severe
portraits of some of her acquaintances:- imputations very little deserved; for, assuredly, the genius which created Corinne had no need of the resources of malice; and all social perfidy is incompatible with the character of Madame de Staël – that character so noble, so courageous under persecution, so faithful in friendship, so generous in devotion. The rage to recognize in works of imagination the individuals whom one meets with in the world, is for these works a real plague. It degrades them, gives them a false direction, destroys their interest, annihilates their utility. To seek for allusions in a romance, is to prefer slander to nature, and to substitute mere gossip for observation of the human heart.
Adolphe Page 2
