6 GERMAINE DE STAEL (1794–1800)
Constant was kicking his heels in Lausanne, attending to his father’s
financial affairs, being lectured to by his relatives (as usual), associating
with visiting English people whom he always found amusing, writing to
Madame de Charrière to defend his belief that repressive measures were a
necessary evil in France on the road to a republic where liberty would
reign and repression would no longer be needed (he had started dating his
letters using the revolutionary calendar—26 Fructidor, etc.—probably to
annoy her). He was also feeling guilty about Charlotte:
Your last letter but one gave me great qualms of conscience about
Charlotte. I feel that I have got into a position with that woman
which makes my conduct look false in my own eyes. While I make
fun of her with you, I send her from time to time, out of decency,
letters filled with affectionate and grandiloquent nonsense, and if
anyone compared my letters to her with my letters about her, I
would rightly be considered an evil and treacherous lunatic. Either
I must have nothing further to do with her, or stop making fun of
her to you or anyone else. And, since I don’t want to break off
relations with her, I must adopt the latter course. So can I ask
you—and I think I have a right to ask it of you—to burn what I’ve
written about her? Thanks to what I say about myself I am already
run down enough by people without needing to be criticized still
more.
(Letter of 12 September 1794^1 )(Fortunately for posterity Isabelle did no such thing, and Constant,
comical and perfidious, attractive and at times repellent, still stands before
us in all his complexity in those letters.) It was against this backdrop of his
old life, with so many of its threads still hanging loose, that a new life was
about to begin for Constant.
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