Two stories relate the first twenty years in the life of a vain and long-suffering Frenchman who engages in a tortured love affair with a possessive older woman
Benjamin Constant (1767-1830) was a French-Swiss political 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 champion of liberalism and the author of The History of Religion. Posterity, however, remembers him as the man who bared the anatomy of a destructive passion in the story of Adolphe (1816).