Benjamin Constant (1767-1830) was a Swiss-born French nobleman, writer and politician. The only novel published by Constant during his lifetime, Adolphe is the story of a young indecisive man's disastrous love affair with an older woman of uncertain virtue, believed to be based on Constant's affair with Anna Lindsay, who describes the affair in her correspendence. The Red Notebook (translated by Norman Cameron) is fictionalized version of Constant's youth, education and travels to England.
Benjamin Constant (1767-1830) was a French-Swiss po-litical writer and novelist. He combined a lively political career with a fertile literary output, while entertaining a series of liaisons with some of Frances most prominent women. Constant was an able parliamentarian, a cham-pion of liberalism and the author of The History of Reli-gion. Posterity, however, remembers him as the man who bared the anatomy of a destructive passion in the story of Adolphe (1816).