a divorce on condition that he was financially rewarded, and Constant saw
Charlotte again in Paris at the end of November. By 1 December his novel
had begun to bore him, and he returned, after having laid it aside ten
months before, to his book on religion: then he turned back once again to
his work of fiction, improving it.^4 By the end of December the novel now
contained an ‘Ellénore episode’ within the story and an account of
Ellénore’s death: this now sounds more like the Adolphe we know,
although it was still contained within a separate autobiographical
framework. Whatever its nature, it cannot but have reflected closely the
impasse of his relationship with Madame de Staël, for it caused a terrible
scene with her when Constant read it aloud on 28 December: he himself
was physically ill and spat blood.
5
It was now to be the story of Ellénore
alone, not of a man caught between two women: Adolphe now seems to
have taken on a separate existence from Cécile in Constant’s mind.
And there our knowledge of the two texts at this period ends. On 2 January 1807
Constant began work again in earnest on his projected study of religion.^6 Charlotte’s
husband was unreconciled to the idea of losing her and indignant at her continuing
sporadic affair with Constant: there was the possibility of a duel, but the storm eventually
blew over. Constant’s resolve wavered from time to time as he recognized Charlotte’s
limitations: ‘Walk with Charlotte: in her character sensitivity, extreme uprightness,
kindness, love, touchiness and a little monotony’ (10 January 1807).^7 In fact marriage to
Charlotte in Napoleon’s newly Catholic France might not be without its complications.
Quite apart from the social stigma of Charlotte’s double divorce, which made it likely
that she would be snubbed in some Parisian circles, a considerable legal problem existed.
Constant was a Protestant divorcee from a wholly Protestant marriage to Minna;
Charlotte’s first husband by a German Protestant marriage, Baron von Marenholtz (whom
she had divorced on 15 August 1794), was still alive, and therefore the practising
Catholic Alexandre Du Tertre ought never to have married her in Brunswick in June
1798—in the eyes of the Catholic church that second marriage was invalid. But the
problem could be simplified: Du Tertre could ask to have his marriage to Charlotte
declared null and void by the Catholic Archbishop of Paris, and then the two Protestant
divorcees could simply enter into a new marriage using any Reformed church that
tolerated divorce and remarriage.
Madame de Staël was putting the finishing touches to Corinne during January 1807 at
the château of Acosta, 12 leagues from Paris, where she was now allowed to live. Her
novel reflects through its gifted Italian poet heroine Germaine’s own disappointment with
weak-willed and unreliable men, personified in the Scotsman Oswald. It has
understandably been viewed as a reply to Constant’s own portrayal of the tragic
predicament of a man very like himself through the character of Adolphe, a man who out
of a sense of loyalty and responsibility stays with a woman, Ellénore, whom he no longer
loves and whose possessiveness torments him.^8 As Germaine saw Corinne through the
press during February and wondered whether to marry the poet Elzéar de Sabran,
Constant became more and more set on marrying his ‘sweet angel’—as his diary
repeatedly calls Charlotte—as a means of liberation from Madame de Staël. But the idea
Italiam 197