Benjamin Constant

Constant reached you yet? We have another cuckold and one more whore in our
capital.’^61
The final blow was to come. Charlotte’s father believed that there was a risk of
scandal from his daughter’s friendship with a man whose marriage to Minna was ending
so publicly and in such bitter mutual recrimination. He insisted that for the time being at
least Charlotte stop meeting Constant. On 31 March 1793 Constant wrote to Isabelle to
tell her that both women were now lost to him:

All my ties are now broken, both those that brought me misery and

those which consoled me. All of them! What a strange weakness in

me: for a year I have been longing for this moment, I couldn’t wait

to be completely independent, but now it’s come I’m shuddering,

I’m horror-stricken by my solitude, I’m terrified of having no one

to care for, just as I once complained so much at being attached to

someone.... After I have spent another two or three months at

Court just to show I have not been dismissed, I shall leave here....

Please rent quite a large apartment in Colombier for me, where I

can have a bedroom, a study and library for my books which I shall

send for and which...may comprise 1,500 volumes.^62

As so often at times of crisis in his life, Constant was planning to return to

a solitary and scholarly existence. But it was not yet to be. Charlotte was

determined not to relinquish all hope of a future together which she had

envisaged after her own separation from Baron von Marenholtz, and she
maintained contact with Constant during April and May 1793. Constant

met Charlotte’s father in April, and began to worry that she would have

him married again in no time. He left for Driburg, a small spa town not far

from Kassel. In fact Charlotte’s father was opposed to the idea of her

remarrying for some years yet, as Charlotte told Constant during a brief
meeting which she arranged with him in Kassel on around 11 May 1793.

She intended to visit him again a fortnight later in Driburg, but by then

Constant had returned to Lausanne. Their correspondence continued

sporadically through 1793, with Charlotte reiterating how much she loved

him and voicing her hopes that at some point in the future they could be
together again. Constant soon came to consider that he had had a very

lucky escape.
The relationship with Charlotte had become burdensome. For the time being Constant
preferred to be free, though he still had considerable affection for ‘my Charlotte’, as he
described her to Isabelle: her naivety often irritated him, but he had felt settled and secure
enough with her to begin ‘a history of his life’ at her home in Brunswick early in 1793,
possibly an early draft of Ma Vie, as his cousin Victor was to report to Rosalie on 29
October 1809.^63 Constant’s flagging feelings for her had been galvanized back into life

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