Introverted from an early age, his melancholic outlook has been formed by conversations with an elderly friend, whose insight into the folly and hypocrisy of the world has hindered rather than helped her in life.

She persuades him to extend his stay by six months, but they quarrel, and when she breaks with the Comte de P*** and leaves her two children in order to be with him, and tends him after he is injured in a duel, he finds himself hopelessly indebted to her.

[2] The novel was partly inspired by Constant's relationships with Madame de Staël and Charlotte von Hardenberg, and at the time of its publication it was widely assumed to be a roman à clef.

Constant was indignant and wrote a letter to the Morning Chronicle of London (23 June 1816) denying any such correspondence between fiction and life, and these objections animate his preface to the second edition.

The novel was adapted in 1968 into a film version Adolphe ou l'Âge tendre directed by Bernard Toublanc-Michel, starring Ulla Jacobsson, Jean-Claude Dauphin, and Philippe Noiret.