HENRI BENJAMIN CONSTANT DE REBECQUE

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Benjamin Constant HDT WHAT? INDEX

BENJAMIN CONSTANT BENJAMIN CONSTANT

1767

October 25, Sunday: Henri Benjamin Constant de Rebecque was born into a family descended from Huguenots who in the early 17th Century had fled from France. His father was Colonel Arnold Louis-Juste Constant Rebecque, a Swissman serving in the military of Holland, and his mother Henrietta Pauline Chandieu died at his birth.

Being expelled from New Spain, all Jesuits headed toward the port of Veracruz, Mexico — most would end up in Italy.

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

Benjamin Constant “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

BENJAMIN CONSTANT BENJAMIN CONSTANT

1782

Benjamin Constant completed his studies at the University of Nürnberg in Bavaria, and would go on to study at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

Benjamin Constant “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

BENJAMIN CONSTANT BENJAMIN CONSTANT

1783

Benjamin Constant completed his studies at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He would spend most of his life in Switzerland and Great Britain, with episodic political involvements in revolutionary France.

By this point George Heriot had left the Royal Military Academy, but remained in Woolwich, employed as a civilian clerk by the Army.

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

Benjamin Constant “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

BENJAMIN CONSTANT BENJAMIN CONSTANT

1786

Benjamin Constant returned from Scotland to Switzerland.

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Benjamin Constant HDT WHAT? INDEX

BENJAMIN CONSTANT BENJAMIN CONSTANT

1787

In Paris, Benjamin Constant took Madame de Charriere, an older Dutchwoman who had married into a Swiss family with which his own was connected, as his mistress. Initially, there was an escapade to England. Their affair –we do not know whether it was more an affair of the intellect or more one of the heart– would endure until in 1796 he would enter into his liaison with Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, Madame de Staël. At this point he began his manuscript on religion, which eventually would appear in 5 volumes as DE LA RELIGION, CONSIDÉRÉE DANS SA SOURCE, SES FORMES ET SES DÉVELOPPEMENTS.

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Benjamin Constant HDT WHAT? INDEX

BENJAMIN CONSTANT BENJAMIN CONSTANT

1788

March: Benjamin Constant became chamberlain at the court of Charles William, duke of Brunswick.

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Benjamin Constant HDT WHAT? INDEX

BENJAMIN CONSTANT BENJAMIN CONSTANT

1789

May 8, Friday: At the court of Charles William, duke of Brunswick, Benjamin Constant got married with a lady in waiting to the duchess of Brunswick, Wilhelmina, Baroness Chramm, and was made a counselor of legation.

The launch of the Bounty was making admirable headway toward Timor under the able leadership of Captain William Bligh, but supplies were of course exceedingly short: This afternoon we got our Boat cleaned out and it took us the whole day to get every thing dry and in Order. Hitherto I have issued the allowance by guess, but I now got a pair of Scales made with two Cocoanutt Shells, and having accidentally some Pistol Balls in the Boat 24 of which weighed one pound, or 16 ounces I adopted one as the proportion of weight that each person should receive of Bread at the times I served it. I also amused all hands with describing the situation of New Guinea and New Holland, and I gave every information that in case any accident happened to me those who survived might have some Idea of what they were about and arrive safe at Timor, which at present they knew nothing of more than the Names. At Night I served a Jill of Water and a ½ ounce of Bread for supper. In the morning half a Jill of Cocoa nutt milk and some of the decayed Bread for Breakfast, and for Dinner I divided the Meat of four Cocoanutts with the remainder of the Rotten Bread which was worse than can well be conceived. HDT WHAT? INDEX

BENJAMIN CONSTANT BENJAMIN CONSTANT

1793

January 11, Friday: Benjamin Constant met Charlotte von Hardenberg (1769-1845), the wife of Christian Albrecht Wilhelm, Baron Mahrenholz (1752-1808). He became friends with both wife and husband — who would divorce. HDT WHAT? INDEX

BENJAMIN CONSTANT BENJAMIN CONSTANT

1794

The marriage of Benjamin Constant was dissolved, and he resigned his post in the court of Charles William, duke of Brunswick, as he became romantically involved with yet another married woman, Madame Germaine de Staël. HDT WHAT? INDEX

BENJAMIN CONSTANT BENJAMIN CONSTANT

1795

May 25, Monday: Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël arrived in Paris from Switzerland.

June 24, Wednesday: William Smellie died in Edinburgh, Scotland. Robert Burns (who wouldn’t himself last much longer) would provide the remark now engraved on the tombstone: Here lies a man who did honour to human nature.

October 15, Thursday: Madame Germaine de Staël was exiled from revolutionary France. Benjamin Constant would follow her to Switzerland. HDT WHAT? INDEX

BENJAMIN CONSTANT BENJAMIN CONSTANT

1796

Mid-April: Benjamin Constant’s initial political pamphlet of import, DE LA FORCE DU GOUVERNEMENT ACTUEL ET DE LA NECESSITE DE SE TALLIER (THE STRENGTH OF THE CURRENT GOVERNMENT AND THE NEED TO JOIN IT), in defense of the Directory, appeared as an insert in The Monitor. HDT WHAT? INDEX

BENJAMIN CONSTANT BENJAMIN CONSTANT

1797

End May to Early June: Benjamin Constant’s EFFECTS OF TERROR following the 2d edition of his THE STRENGTH OF THE CURRENT GOVERNMENT AND THE NEED TO JOIN IT. HDT WHAT? INDEX

BENJAMIN CONSTANT BENJAMIN CONSTANT

1803

Benjamin Constant followed Madame de Staël into exile from Napoléon’s France. HDT WHAT? INDEX

BENJAMIN CONSTANT BENJAMIN CONSTANT

1811

While visiting Hardenberg near Göttingen, contact with German mysticism began to make Benjamin Constant somewhat less sceptical toward religion. HDT WHAT? INDEX

BENJAMIN CONSTANT BENJAMIN CONSTANT

1813

November: Henri Benjamin Constant de Rebecque’s DE L’ESPRIT DE CONQUETE ET DE L’USURPATION DANS LEURS RAPPORTS AVEC LA CIVILISATION EUROPEENNE, a political writing in opposition to Napoléon, was published at Hanover.

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

Benjamin Constant “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

BENJAMIN CONSTANT BENJAMIN CONSTANT

1815

Benjamin Constant returned to Paris in order to advocate liberal constitutional principles. HDT WHAT? INDEX

BENJAMIN CONSTANT BENJAMIN CONSTANT

1824

Publication of the initial volume of Henri Benjamin Constant de Rebecque’s DE LA RELIGION, CONSIDÉRÉE DANS SA SOURCE, SES FORMES ET SES DÉVELOPPEMENTS (Paris: Bosange).

DE LA RELIGION, 1 HDT WHAT? INDEX

BENJAMIN CONSTANT BENJAMIN CONSTANT

1830

December 8, Wednesday: In consequence of a fall in the Chamber of Deputies, Benjamin Constant had been crippled for years — and in fact had fought his last of many duels while seated in a chair. On this day, after long illness, he died.

December 12, Sunday: A state funeral was held for Benjamin Constant. During the ceremony, some young fans had to be discouraged from carrying his coffin into the Pantheon. It was carried instead to the cemetery Pere-Lachaise, in Paris’s 29th Arrondissement. HDT WHAT? INDEX

BENJAMIN CONSTANT BENJAMIN CONSTANT

1831

Posthumous publication of the final volume (of five) of Henri Benjamin Constant de Rebecque’s DE LA RELIGION, CONSIDÉRÉE DANS SA SOURCE, SES FORMES ET SES DÉVELOPPEMENTS (Paris: Bosange). HDT WHAT? INDEX

BENJAMIN CONSTANT BENJAMIN CONSTANT

1837

April 27, Thursday: David Henry Thoreau checked out, from Harvard Library, the 1st volume either of John Toland (1670-1722)’s A COMPLETE COLLECTION OF THE HISTORICAL, POLITICAL, AND MISCELLANEOUS WORKS OF JOHN MILTON, BOTH ENGLISH AND LATIN. WITH SOME PAPERS NEVER BEFORE PUBLISH’D (3 volumes, Amsterdam, 1698), or of Dr. Thomas Birch (1705-1766)’s A COMPLETE COLLECTION OF THE HISTORICAL, POLITICAL, AND MISCELLANEOUS WORKS OF JOHN MILTON (2 volumes, London, 1738) — and we don’t know which.

Thoreau also checked out the 1st of the five volumes of Henri Benjamin Constant de Rebecque’s DE LA RELIGION CONSIDÉRÉE DANS SA SOURCE, SES FORMES ET SES DÉVELOPPEMENTS (Paris: Bosange, 1824-1831).

DE LA RELIGION, 1 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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From George Templeton Strong’s New-York diary:

Matters very bad out of doors. Confidence annihilated, the whole community, big and little, traveling to ruin in a body. Strong fears entertained for the banks, and if they go, God only knows what the consequences will be. Ruin here, and on the other side of the Atlantic, and not only private ruin but political convulsion and revolution, I think ....

In Washington DC, our nation’s capital, George Kephart was advertising that his firm, located at the west end of Duke Street, would be willing to offer the highest cash price for “likely Negroes, from ten to twenty-five years of age.”

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 27th of 4th M / Took Shaws Carryall & with my wife & Mary Williams rode to Portsmouth to attend Monthly Meeting — In the first Meeting Wm Jenkins abovementioned was present & preached — We thought him a concerned young man, but his offering was evidently premature & the fruit unripe - after Meeting Henry Gould & I felt it our duty to take an opportuinity with him & advise him to return home as soon as he could, as he acknowledged he had come away against the advice of his friends — he seemed disposed to take our advice, & we felt satisfied we had done our duty toward him as caretakers in society. — The Buisness in the last meeting was orderly conducted — We all Dined at Benjamin Motts in the room where it is said Geo Fox once preached, but we had sense enough [to] know he is not there now. — HDT WHAT? INDEX

BENJAMIN CONSTANT BENJAMIN CONSTANT

June 1, Thursday: Having already checked out the 1st volume of Henri Benjamin Constant de Rebecque’s DE LA RELIGION CONSIDÉRÉE DANS SA SOURCE, SES FORMES ET SES DÉVELOPPEMENTS, David Henry Thoreau checked out the 2d and 3rd volumes.

DE LA RELIGION, 2 DE LA RELIGION, 3

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 1st of 6 M 1837 / Our Meeting was small but solid & comfortable - Father had a few words to offer acceptably. — HDT WHAT? INDEX

BENJAMIN CONSTANT BENJAMIN CONSTANT

June 2, Friday: David Henry Thoreau’s Harvard College essay on assignment “The mark or standard by which a nation is judged to be barbarous or civilized. Barbarities of civilized states.”

(This assigned essay was intended to be based upon the class’s study of Henri Benjamin Constant de Rebecque’s DE LA RELIGION CONSIDÉRÉE DANS SA SOURCE, SES FORMES ET SES DÉVELOPPEMENTS.)

DE LA RELIGION, 1 DE LA RELIGION, 2 DE LA RELIGION, 3

(An interesting question would be, how much of Thoreau’s lifelong preoccupation with tribal red Americans, as we find in his “Indian Notebooks,” can we find presaged in this early response to Constant’s musings?) The justice of a nation’s claim to be regarded as civilized seems to depend mainly upon the degree in which Art has triumphed over Nature. Civilization is the influence of Art, and not Nature, on Man. He mingles his own will with the unchanged essences around him, and becomes in his turn the creature of his own creations. The end of life is education. An education is good or bad according to the disposition or frame of mind it induces. If it tend to cherish and develope [sic] the religious sentiment, — continuously to remind man of his mysterious relation to God and Nature, — and to exalt him above the toil and drudgery of this matter-of-fact world, it is good. Civilization we think not only does not accomplish this, but is directly adverse to it. The civilized man is the slave of Matter. Art paves the earth, lest he may soil the soles of his feet; it builds walls that he may not see the Heavens; year in, year out, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the sun rises in vain to him; the rain falls and the wind blows, but they do not reach him. From his wigwam of brick and mortar he praises his Maker for the genial warmth of a sun he never saw, or the fruitfulness of an earth he disdains to tread upon. Who says that this is not mockery? So much for the influence of Art. Our rude forefathers took liberal and enlarged views of things, — rarely narrow or partial. They surrendered up themselves wholly to Nature; to contemplate her was a part of their daily food. Was she stupendous? so were their conceptions. The inhabitant of a mountain can hardly be brought to use a microscope; he is accustomed to embrace empires in a single glance. Nature is continually exerting a moral influence over man; she accommodates herself to the soul of man. Hence his conceptions are as gigantic as her mountains. We may see an instance of this if we will but turn our eyes to the strongholds of Liberty, — Scotland, Switzerland and Wales. What more stupendous can Art contrive than the Alps? What more sublime than the thunder among the hills? The savage is far-sighted;" his eye, like the Poet’s, —

“Doth glance from Heaven to Earth, from Earth to Heaven.”1

He looks far into futurity, wandering as familiarly through the Land of Spirits, as the civilized man through his woodlot or pleasure-grounds. His life is practical poetry, a perfect epic. The earth is his hunting-ground; he lives summers and winters; the sun is his time-piece, — he journeys to its rising or its setting; to the abode of Winter, or the land whence Summer comes. He never listens to the thunder but he is reminded of the Great Spirit, — it is his voice. To him the lightning is less terrible than it is sublime; the rainbow less beautiful than it is wonderful; the sun less warm than it is glorious. The savage dies and is buried; he sleeps with his forefathers, and before many winters his dust returns to dust again, and his body is mingled with the elements. The civilized man can scarce sleep even in his grave. Not even there are the weary at rest, nor do the wicked cease from troubling. What with the hammering of stone, and the grating of bolts, the worms themselves are wellnigh deceived. Art rears his monument. Learning contributes his epitaph, and Interest adds the “Carey fecit” as a salutary check upon the unearthly emotions which a perusal might otherwise excite. A nation may be ever so civilized, and yet lack wisdom. Wisdom is the result of education; and education being the bringing- out or development of that which is in man, by contact with the

1. This snippet is from William Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Act v. Scene 1: The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Not-me, — that is by Life, — is far safer in the hands of Nature than of Art. The savage may be, and often is a sage. Our Indian is more of a man than the inhabitant of a city. He lives as a man, he thinks as a man, he dies as a man. The latter, it is true, is learned. Learning is Art’s creature, but it is not essential to the perfect man; it cannot educate. A man may spend days in the study of a single species of animalcule, invisible to the naked eye, and thus become the founder of a new branch of science, — without having advanced the great objects for which life was given him, at all. The naturalist, the chemist, the mechanist is no more a man for all his learning. Life is still as short as ever, death as inevitable, and the heavens as far off. THE ACTUAL DOCUMENT

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING, HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Benjamin Constant HDT WHAT? INDEX

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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2014. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: June 12, 2014 HDT WHAT? INDEX

BENJAMIN CONSTANT BENJAMIN CONSTANT

ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.