7
‘THE INTERMITTENCES OF
THE HEART’ (1800–1806)
Anna Lindsay (1764–1820), née O’Dwyer, the daughter of an Irish
Catholic innkeeper from Calais, had been educated at the expense of the
Duchess de Fitz-James and, in order never to return to poverty, had
accepted a number of male ‘protectors’, the first, a Monsieur de Conflans,
described by Julie Talma as ‘mediocre’ in a letter to Constant of 8 July
1802.^1 Conflans was followed by a British officer, Louis Drummond, who
went through a form of marriage with her when she was 20 and lived with
her in Paris for two years. It was he who encouraged her to change her
name to Lindsay. In 1788 she gave him a son, Charles. In 1789
Drummond abandoned her and returned to Scotland, whereupon Anna
began an eleven-year liaison with a married man, Auguste de Lamoignon,
whom Julie Talma thought ‘pitiful’.^2 Anna bore him two children,
followed him to London during the Terror—where her drawing-room
became the meeting place of a distinguished circle of émigrés—and
showed him exceptional loyalty and devotion. Her reward was to see
Lamoignon later seek a rapprochement with his wife for purely financial
reasons. And it was at this precise moment in her life that she was
introduced to Constant by her close friend Julie Talma. As the result of her
upbringing and the injustices she had suffered at the hands of men, Anna
showed an unusual mixture of character traits: she was intelligent, well
read in French and English literature; she was a devout Catholic with
royalist leanings—quite the opposite of her friend the free-thinking
republican Julie, and of course of Constant; she was ambitious, passionate,
sensitive, and had a strong sense of her own worth; she was also beautiful
and had gained considerable sexual experience.
Within a few days of their first meeting Constant was in love with Anna, and his love
was returned. They began corresponding in both French and English, and became lovers.
In an undated letter to Constant Julie Talma remarked, ‘When [Anna] is in the room, you
lose all common sense’,^3 and it was the same for Anna with Constant: they lost their
heads in a delirium of physical passion, Constant visiting her between Tribunate meetings
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