[Charlotte] again, the woman who changed my whole life and whom I
loved so passionately for a few days. I am quite curious about meeting her
after twelve years of separation.’
75
In the event he was too cool with
Charlotte, at least that was his feeling afterwards: he was afraid of
becoming involved again lest his writing suffer. He saw her again, met her
‘cold but polite’ husband, the Vicomte Du Tertre, and she once more
offered him her fortune: her feelings for Constant were still as strong as
ever. He found both Anna and Charlotte with similar feelings towards
him—of desire mingled with resentment—and he straightaway retreated.
He even considered the commercial alternative which was available in
Paris—that of hiring a mistress to spend three months at Les Herbages
with him so that he would have agreeable company when he wanted it, but
could also work without distraction—but the arrangement fell through.
The problem, as in Adolphe, was not so much the risk of falling in love
again himself as someone else falling in love with him—and all the pain
that might bring them both.
January 1805 was spent at Les Herbages, with frequent trips to Paris, sometimes to
visit prostitutes, as Constant’s diary candidly records. He was still wrestling with the
problem of shaping his book, abandoning plan after plan and studying Roman
polytheism—thereby forming the nucleus of what would eventually become his study Du
polythéisme romain. On 9 January he learned that Ludwig Ferdinand Huber had died, and
on 19 January he confided to his journal: ‘[I am filled with] a kind of terror about Fate. I
never draw a line under my journal entry for the day without a feeling of anxiety about
what that next unknown day will bring.’^76 It was to be a year marked by illness and loss,
one which revived Constant’s death obsession and threatened to plunge him into
depression. As he remarked on 25 January: ‘Suffering, whether genuine or simulated,
will for ever be all-powerful over me.’^77 Nothing was settled in his life: he saw Charlotte
and Anna regularly in Paris; Charlotte’s husband became jealous and Constant felt pity
for Charlotte, forced to live in the dispiriting company of the ignorant and bigoted
provincial French gentry. As for Anna, Constant’s feelings for her were liable to catch
fire at any moment, and the same was true for her. He contemplated writing to Germaine
de Staël in Italy to propose marriage and, if she refused, leaving alone to settle in Weimar
or Berlin. He was more than ever engaged in the continuing financial dispute with his
father, and remarked in his diary on 20 March: There is always something hurtful in the
style [of his letters]. Anyone would think that I am the only one of his children who has
no right to his money.’^78 Above all, perhaps, literary fame continued to elude him,
making any praise he received for small achievements unbearable. Small wonder that as a
consequence he was frequently overcome that winter with bouts of extreme melancholy.
Nevertheless, to the outside observer it is clear that a strange thing was slowly happening:
Constant’s entries in his Journaux intimes were becoming the matrix of feelings, striking
observations and aphorisms out of which Adolphe would shortly grow. Indeed on the
strength of his diaries alone, had he wished to publish them, he need have had no reason
to fear about his literary talent.
The intermittences of the heart 189