help of the Reverend Bridges but was also obliged to attend lengthy prayer meetings in
the rectory during which Bridges in his fervour often beat his head on the floorboards;
and finally back to Richard Kentish’s house in Gower Street, London. All the time he
continued to send Isabelle de Charrière letters filled with literary allusions, parodies and
manic clowning. And all the while, it seems, he was thinking about his novel. For on his
return journey from Scotland he told her, in a letter dated ‘Westmoreland/Patterdale, 29th
August 1787’:
I’ve given up the idea of writing a formal novel. I’m too talkative
by nature. All those characters who wanted to speak in my place
made me impatient. I like speaking for myself, especially when you
are the one who’s listening. Instead of the novel there will be letters
entitled: Lettres Ecrites de Patterdale a Paris dans lété de 1787
adressées a Me de C. de Z. [Letters written from Patterdale to
Paris in the summer of 1787 addressed to Madame de C. de Z., i.e.
Charrière de Zuylen], that doesn’t hold me to anything. There will
be a plot of sorts which I shall take up or drop depending how I
feel, but I ask you and Monsieur de Charrière (who I hope has not
forgotten his foolish friend) to keep absolutely quiet about it. I want
to see what people will say or not say about it because I expect to
be punished with obscurity rather than honoured by the critics. I’ve
only written two letters so far...I write without any great attention
to the conventional rules of style or expression, I don’t work at any
set times, I simply write it down as it comes into my head.^20What conclusions can we draw from these remarks? First, that in all
probability Constant’s novel began as either a third-person narrative or as
a series of fictional letters written by a number of correspondents. Second,
that Constant found himself unable or unwilling to continue with a novel
written in such a form because he felt the need to express his own thoughts
and ideas through a first-person narrative. Third, that his preferred form
for a novel would be very like his real letters to Isabelle de Charrière,
because not only does he wish to speak on his own behalf, he also needs to
have present in his mind the idea of a listener as attentive and intelligent as
she is. As in his letter from ‘Chesterford’ quoted earlier, Constant was
determined to see his novel in print. Furthermore, in the section of his
letter which follows that quoted above, he mockingly alludes to the kind
of language used by Jenny Pourrat’s mother, turgid phrases like ‘do not
ask for my indulgence when you already have my friendship’,
21
and
indicates that his own style will be simple and natural.
Constant’s extraordinary summer idyll in rural England and Scotland ended with his
brief stay with the kindly, pious, Low-Church rector Nathaniel Bridges (whom his father
Escape 99