aging royalist father, Jacques Necker, Dernières vues de politique et de finances (Last
Thoughts on Politics and Finance) which appeared the same month. As Henri Grange has
demonstrated,^35 Necker’s influence on Constant has generally been underestimated: in the
long run he may have won Constant over to accepting the idea of a constitutional
monarchy.
Constant decided not to return to Paris at the end of October as he had in the past,
perhaps judging that there was an element of risk in being so close to the centre of power.
Letters were read, informers now reported on conversations, there was a general
atmosphere of suspicion everywhere, and Constant’s known hostility to Bonaparte might
have brought retribution. He stayed in Switzerland and continued, despite ill health,
severe eye troubles and financial worries, to work on Principes de politique, constantly
rewriting and recasting it—his usual method of work with non-literary material. From
November 1802 he was based in Geneva, and tried to avoid all political discussion. Then,
in December 1802, Madame de Staël’s epistolary novel Delphine was published in Paris
in three volumes. The novel, set during the Revolution, concerns Delphine d’Albémar, an
unconventional and articulate woman who comes into conflict with society’s rules and
conventions. Although it achieved considerable popu-larity, Bonaparte objected to views
expressed in it which indirectly called into question his rule and his policies. Constant
wrote to his friend the historian and critic Claude Fauriel (1772–1844) on 28 December
1802 asking his opinion of the work and adding: ‘I have seen few novels in which there
are so many new and perceptive observations, such truth in the depiction of character,
and such lofty sentiments.’^36 But even as he praised la dame de Coppet and her talent,
Constant was planning his escape from her, this time by marriage to Amélie Fabri (1771–
1809), a full account of which is to be found in the first of Constant’s Journaux intimes.
Amélie et Germaine (16 January–10 April 1803).^37 In January 1803 he decided he needed
marriage so that he would have someone to love and look after him: no outstanding
intelligence was required of the fortunate woman, but she needed to have money and
good sense. Amélie, a member of Genevan society, had some of the necessary qualities,
but Constant was concerned that she lacked mesure in her conversation; she was forever
indulging in inane humour and repartee, and as a wife she might bring ridicule upon her
husband. Constant’s breathtaking condescension—expressed, of course, in candid diary
entries never intended for publication—was not only part of the age he lived in, it was
also a fundamental part of him: he needed a housekeeper and companion, that was what
marriage was about. But there was too a side of him that must invite sympathy even from
the most censorious observer: he needed mothering, although he would never have put it
in those terms. Intellectual and sexual satisfaction he could always find elsewhere: what
he needed was a continuity of calm, uncritical affection, of the kind that he had all too
rarely experienced.^38 Marriage would have the advantage of enabling Constant to
continue his friendship with Germaine de Staël, while no longer being tied to her as her
lover in a humiliating secondary role or having to endure frequent stormy scenes with
her. Moreover, although they both were fiercely opposed to the despotic rule of
Bonaparte, Germaine was taking brave but foolish risks in that area. There was now a
proposal from Bonaparte to his advisers that he be crowned Emperor: Germaine might
step on the lion’s tail once too often. In any case the official lover Constant had been
temporarily supplanted by a handsome married Irishman named O’Brien whom Madame
de Staël was currently pursuing.^39 Nevertheless during March 1803 her jealousy on
The intermittences of the heart 181