No pains were spared to give this brilliant, intellectual youth an education suited to his gifts. He was first sent to the University of Edinburgh, where he formed friendships with several distinguished young Englishmen and Scotchmen, almost all of whom were destined to become famous. From Edinburgh he went to the small, peaceful University of Erlangen, where the foundation was laid of his acquaintance with German literature and German affairs in general. Here, as in Edinburgh, he displayed more interest in the politics of the old Greek republics than in their poetry. We gain the most trustworthy information on the subject of Constant's youthful character and development from his letters to Mme. de Charrière, a gifted, free-thinking Swiss authoress, Dutch by birth but completely Gallicised, who was over forty years of age when Constant, then in his twentieth year, first made her acquaintance. It was in this lady's house, sitting beside her while she wrote, that, at the age of nineteen, he began the great book on religion at which he was to work almost all his life, making perpetual alterations as his views changed and took more definite form. He finished it thirty years later, in the hours which he could spare from the Chamber and the Paris gambling-tables. But it was begun at Mme. de Charrière's; and there was a curious significance in the fact that the first instalment was written on the backs of a pack of playing cards, each card, as it was filled, being handed to his mentor. Constant expresses himself with absolute frankness in his letters to this faithful and devoted friend; from them we learn how he felt and thought as a youth. The feelings and thoughts are those of the eighteenth century, minus its enthusiasm for certain ideas, and plus a good deal of doubt. He writes:-- [Illustration: BENJAMIN CONSTANT] "I feel the emptiness of everything more than ever; it is all promise and no fulfilment. I feel how superior our powers are to our circumstances, and how wretched this incongruity must inevitably make us. I wonder if God, who created us and our environment, did not die before He finished His work, if the world is not an _opus posthumum_? He had the grandest and most beautiful intentions, and all the means for carrying them out. He had begun to use these means, the scaffolding for the building was erected, but in the midst of His work He died. Everything is constructed with an aim which has ceased to exist; we, in particular, feel ourselves destined for something of which we can form no conception. We are like clocks without dials or hands, whose wheels, which are not without understanding, revolve until they are worn out, without knowing why, but saying, 'I revolve, therefore I have an aim.'--Farewell, you dear, clever wheel, who have the misfortune to be so superior to the clock-work of which you are a part and which you disturb! Without too much self-praise I may say that I am in the same predicament."