sont signes exprès de bestise’, stating things categorically and sticking
stubbornly to one’s opinions are a sure sign of stupidity.
13
She saw the
dangers inherent in such unshakeable certainty, and made sure that
Constant saw them too.
A closed dogmatic mind was always odious to Madame de Charrière, not only in the
writing of fiction but in religious and political matters. It would not be difficult to
illustrate from her Correspondance her equal hostility to monarchist and Jacobin,
religious fanatic and doctrinaire atheist. Such people were no longer alive to the complex
and changing reality around them: more dangerous still, in their firm conviction that they
knew, that they had access to absolute and infallible truth, there was an arrogance and a
pride that flew in the face of a fact which the sceptical Isabelle de Charrière was only too
aware of: that we all make mistakes. In her youth Isabelle de Charrière had, for a while,
sought dependable certainty in mathematics. And yet it is clear that she remained
permanently fascinated by irresolute people like William, the central figure of her novel
Caliste, an important precursor of Adolphe, fascinated too by indecision and by problems
where the grounds for a decision one way or another are most finely balanced. These
themes are the basis not only of Lettres écrites de Lausanne but also of Trois femmes and
its manuscript continuation. Questions of choice—often delayed choice—and
responsibility for that choice could not but interest this sceptic whose alter ego was
trenchantly decisive and at times rather too resolute for some of her friends.
Such, then, was the woman who had now set Benjamin Constant’s mind in a ferment.
She appears thinly disguised in Cécile as ‘Mme de Chenevière’ of whom Constant says:
‘Her wide-ranging, bold and original intellect completely captivated me at a time in my
life when intellect was much more necessary to me than it is now.’^14 ‘Bizarre’ is the
adjective that attaches itself to her in his memory: it occurs in Ma Vie, in Cécile and in
Adolphe.^15 In May 1790 Constant was to tell Isabelle that she would always be ‘the
dearest and strangest of my memories’.^16 But it was a ‘differentness’, an oddity with
which he was completely at home and in which he discovered himself. We must dismiss
once and for all, then, the notion which Constant put about in his later life that at the age
of 19 he was a tender plant and that the powerful rays of Isabelle de Charrière’s intellect
had in some way shrivelled or deformed him. On the contrary, she had been just what he
had wanted at that age and, more important, just what he had needed. He was a
sophisticated, rather hard-bitten young man who needed a friend who could take all of
that in her stride, matching him in worldly wisdom, but who could also, by her tactful
trust and affection, offer him a way out of the impasse in which he found himself. As we
shall see, the young Constant’s letters amply confirm that Isabelle was a tonic to him. If
she also helped him to stop being an obedient votary of his father, it would surely in the
circumstances be a severe judge who would not add a tant mieux—so much the better.
We left Constant, earlier in this chapter, on the high road to London, more than a little
amazed at what he had had the courage to do, his mind filled by Isabelle de Charrière
with infinite possibilities for what he might yet do and become. His first letter to her,
written in haste at Dover as he awaited the stagecoach, is a masterpiece, and begins with
the kind of literary allusiveness with which subsequent letters would be crammed:
Escape 95