Novel
Adolphe
Benjamin Constant · 1816
Synopsis
Adolphe, a minister's son, has just finished his studies at Göttingen, at twenty-two. At a small German court, he sets out to seduce Ellénore, ten years his senior, the companion of a count by whom she has two children, less out of passion than out of a need to be loved. She leaves everything to follow him, her position as well as her children. From then on he no longer loves her and cannot tell her so: he stays out of pity, hurts her out of weariness, while his father and his father's friends press him to break it off.
Context
Constant began the novel on 30 October 1806, at Germaine de Staël's house, in Rouen, and finished it before 1810. It appeared in June 1816 from Henry Colburn, in London, a week before the Paris printing by Treuttel and Würtz; a new preface followed in July, and the corrected edition of 1824 is regarded as the definitive text. Readers at once looked in it for the author's life, his liaisons with Germaine de Staël and Charlotte de Hardenberg; he denied it in a letter to the Morning Chronicle of 23 June 1816, and critics have since rejected that reading.
Who it is for
A very short novel, in the first person. Psychological analysis takes the place of plot.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as a masterpiece of the novel of analysis; it can be read in paperback, in French as well as in Leonard Tancock's English translation.