Benjamin Constant

spoke, sometimes laughing like an idiot at something I had done in

all sincerity and in despair half an hour before. The collapse of all

my plans concerning Mademoiselle Pourrat brought me even closer

to Madame de Charrière. She was the only woman with whom I

could converse freely because she was the only one who didn’t

bore me with advice or remonstrations about my conduct.^10

Like many people, Constant grew rather more conservative with the years,
and perhaps this, as well as an obscure resentment against the woman who

had done so much for him, makes for the disapproving tone that breaks

through intermittently in passages like the one quoted above from Ma Vie.
We are not obliged to share all the valuations which the writer of 1810–11 felt moved
to put on the experiences of the young man he had been in 1787, especially when we
possess his letters and other evidence from that earlier period which show him in a
different and undoubtedly truer light. And from these and from all we have seen so far it
is perfectly obvious that talking to Isabelle de Charrière gave the 19-year-old Constant a
unique, positive and longed-for sense of liberation. To begin with, they were so alike that,
if they had believed in such a notion, they might have called their meeting providential.
They were as mercurial and as restless as each other; and both of them believed they had
never been loved enough. Part at least of the ‘deeper and much closer relationship’ which
Ma Vie says soon developed between them^11 was a reinforcing of their individual sense
of identity. The spiritual estrangement from which each had been suffering was at an end.
There was now at least one other person who spoke the same language, who laughed at
the same things, and who in very recent years had been through similar turmoil and
heartache. It is hardly surprising that Isabelle found little to criticize in Benjamin: he was
far too like herself. As Edouard Laboulaye says, she gave Constant the stable affection
which allowed him to feel what it might have been like to have a mother—indeed she
was almost the same age as Henriette de Chandieu would have been if she had lived. And
to Isabelle de Charrière, a childless woman, he was a son, a polisson, a wild scamp
certainly, but brilliant, destined perhaps for great success in the world, and entirely
devoted to her. At this crucial moment in Constant’s early manhood Isabelle was in a
position to open his eyes to his father’s obtuseness towards him—she had had plenty of
experience of similar treatment herself—and, perhaps unwittingly, she appears to have
prepared the way for his defiance of the paternal edict when it eventually came. On the
day he was due to leave for Holland with Lieutenant Benay, Constant says,

My mind continued to be in a state of great ferment, to which my

conversations with Madame de Charrière contributed in no small

measure. She certainly could not have foreseen the effect she

would have on me, but by talking to me constantly about the

stupidity of the human race, the absurdity of received ideas, and by

sharing my admiration for everything that was original,

extraordinary or bizarre she ended up by inspiring in me a craving

to live like her in a way which was out of the ordinary. As yet I had

Escape 93