It is the question of the conditions of constancy which is treated of in _Adolphe_--under what conditions is passion lasting or otherwise? And it is the answer to this question which is really an impeachment of society. For it is maintained that while society, in this case represented by public opinion, upholds those unions which are of its own institution, it at the same time basely strives to destroy all possibilities of faithfulness in any union it has not sanctioned, even if that union be to the full as honourable, to the full as unselfish, as any of those which it fences round and supports. Constant prefers his accusation in a story which could hardly be less pretentious. It contains but two characters, no scenery, and there is not a single fortuitous incident in the whole course of its action. Everything occurs according to the natural laws indicated by the relations of the couple to each other and to society in general. The reader follows this history of two souls to its close much as a student of chemistry watches the fermentation of two substances in an inexplosible phial and observes the results. Who, then, are these two characters? In the first place, who is _he_? He is a very young man, who (like the author) has been given an appointment at one of the little German courts, after completing his studies at a small German university. He has been tolerably dissipated, but has also gone through a course of serious and laborious study. His relations with his father, an outwardly cold, ironical man, who represents the culture of the eighteenth century, have increased the hero's youthful taste for powerful, passionate emotions, and his leaning to the unusual, the extravagant. His father's severe discipline has inspired him with an impatient longing for freedom from the bonds which gall him, and a strong disinclination to let himself be trammelled by new ones. At this stage of his development he comes to a court where monotony and formality reign. To him, who from his earliest youth has felt an unconquerable aversion to dogmatism and formalism, it is positive suffering to be obliged to listen to his companions' eternal platitudes. "The self-satisfied chatter of mediocrity about absolutely unquestionable and unshakable religious, moral, or social principles, all considered of equal importance, drove me to contradict, not so much because I was of a different opinion as because I had no patience with such clumsy, stolid certainty. I was involuntarily on the alert against all these general maxims which are considered universally applicable, without restriction or modification. The blockheads knead their morality into such an indivisible mass that it cannot possibly permeate their actions and be applicable in individual cases."