previous August, possibly through Louvet. A highly intelligent woman
and staunchly republican, Julie greatly admired Constant’s wit and
intellect. They saw each other regularly in the early summer of 1796 and a
firm friendship came into being.^47 Although their relationship appears
never to have become a sexual one, there is little doubt that Julie—who
was twelve years Constant’s senior and was unhappy with her unfaithful
husband whom she would divorce in 1801—loved Constant, and there is
perhaps something of a parallel here with Isabelle de Charrière. In the
meantime Germaine de Staël who was still in Switzerland was banned by
the Directory from setting foot on French soil, being considered politically
meddlesome and suspect, and Constant himself had to appeal to the
government against a law requiring all foreigners to leave Paris. Indeed he
was active all summer trying to cease being a foreigner and to obtain
French citizenship by the best means available to him—by drawing
attention to his rights under a new law that had recently allowed his father
to take French citizenship as a descendant of Huguenot exiles.^48 His
request was finally to be granted on 21 March 1797, although the question
of his nationality would dog him intermittently for the rest of his life.
Germaine herself, who was of Swiss Protestant ancestry, was to claim the
same privilege, and would be helped in drawing up the required
documents by Constant.^49
The repercussions of Constant’s pamphlet continued, and in July 1796 he felt his
honour to have been impugned by a vitriolic article from the pen of a journalist Louis-
François Bertin (‘Bertin de Veaux’) calling him a ‘discourteous little Swiss’ and accusing
him of being a Jacobin terrorist. Never afraid of a fight, Constant challenged Bertin to a
duel with pistols on 14 or 15 July, and wrote a will leaving his house in Lausanne, La
Chablière, to Germaine and other effects to his aunt, Anne de Nassau.^50 Fortunately the
promise of a published apology by Bertin made on the field of combat prevented any
bloodshed, and in later years the two men became friends. But the shock Germaine
experienced when looking back on this whole affair and its possibly fatal consequences
deepened her feelings for Benjamin so that when he rejoined her at Coppet in Switzerland
on 4 August 1796 he found that she had now fallen passionately in love with him.^51 There
was talk of a divorce from her husband, the Baron de Staël, and some speculation about a
possible remarriage to Constant. By the time Constant left Germaine to return to Paris on
7 October she was pregnant.
In France Constant tried to secure citizenship for Germaine and published a favourable
review of her essay on the influence of the passions which appeared in Le Moniteur on 26
October 1796.^52 But he did not neglect his own future and, partly on money borrowed
from Germaine’s father, Jacques Necker, bought Hérivaux, a ruined abbey and estate
near Luzarches, 20 miles north of Paris, for 50,000 francs on 1 November,^53 sold two of
his French farms and prepared to sell La Chablière in Lausanne. It was a grandiose
gesture which also had a practical objective, that of enabling Constant to stand for
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