Was he serious? Only partly so, seems to be the likely answer: he was acting out a role
in all probability, and waiting to see what would happen, as with Mrs Trevor or Jenny
Pourrat, or like Adolphe with Ellénore: a cruel amusement but also a risky one, since he
might end up ‘feeling the emotions he at first only feigned’, again like Adolphe. For
Charlotte was not to be underestimated. She did not have the intellect of an Isabelle de
Charrière, and if her speech was anything like her written style, judging by the surviving
letters to Constant, it can have held few of the sophisticated pleasures of listening to
Belle, whose crisp ironic wit and verbal inventiveness matched Constant’s own: indeed
Constant was to mock Charlotte’s style mercilessly in his letters to Colombier. Charlotte
could be exceedingly slow on the uptake, naive and easily gulled, as a particularly
heartless practical joke which Constant played on her was soon to show.^56 Her tastes
were pre-Romantic and tended towards the sentimental. But Charlotte also had
considerable personal warmth; she was capable of heroic unselfishness and quiet
determination; she had staying power, remaining calm, patient and resilient in
adversity—qualities that were to be tested to the limit in the later years of her relationship
with Constant.
Constant’s letters to Charlotte from this period have been lost or destroyed. Perhaps it
is as well for him, since they would doubtless have presented a fairly shocking contrast
with what he was writing to Isabelle de Charrière at the same time about the woman he
nicknamed ‘Le Grand Cachet’ on account of the enormous seal on Charlotte’s letters. A
number of mostly undated letters in French from Charlotte to Constant have survived
from the first half of 1793: these love letters are written in an often exclamatory,
sometimes rather tedious reach-me-down style, full of protestations and reproaches,
cloyingly sentimental too with occasional adolescent simpering and clumsy coquetry.
Constant later recognized what literary critics tend to overlook: that a written style that
looks stale and affected may nevertheless be the expression of genuine feelings:
What will you gain, Sir, by destroying the illusion which gives
charm to my life? If I am unhappy, will you be any the happier?
Am I loved? Why do you fill me with fear? If I am forced to doubt
this man, I shall never trust another. No, I am sure of his heart.
With such grace it could never prove false to me!^57The Charlotte who could write these lines—and worse—to Constant in
1793 meant what she said: Constant might snigger, but her sincerity could
not be doubted. It may be that he had never met anybody quite like her
before. She had a German seriousness and simplicity which, as time went
by, seemed to offer a way out of the very French maze of irony and
facetiousness he chafed against being trapped in. One might go as far as
saying that Constant’s attraction to Charlotte offers a valuable insight into
his contradictory nature. The real Constant was both the man who was
drawn to the gentle and uncomplicated Charlotte and the disabused salon
wit whose paradoxes and asperity proclaimed his unwillingness ever to
take anything or anyone at face value. This was the problem that dogged
Benjamin constant 142