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 lesions with some of France's 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). Translated from French by Carl Wildman.