I cannot live with a person who is perpetually taking the pulse of
her own sensibility and who gets cross when I don’t always show
enough interest in her self-analysis. Charlotte is less complicated,
life with her is plain sailing.^23On 4 December 1807 Germaine de Staël at last left on the first stage of a
journey to Vienna she had planned with Schlegel, and Constant, having
said farewell to her in Lausanne, joined Charlotte in Besançon on 6
December after a nightmare coach journey over the snow-covered Jura
mountains.^24 What exactly happened thereafter is a mystery that we may
never get to the bottom of: it is a black hole, as it were, deliberately
created by Constant—or perhaps by Charlotte—in the middle of his
biography for reasons it is hard to fathom. What we know for certain is
that Charlotte had returned from Germany, had travelled from Paris to
Besançon where Constant had arranged to meet her; Constant did join her
but was his usual vacillating self and asked her for time in which to make
up his mind. On the coach journey to Dole Charlotte was taken violently
ill, and by the time she reached there she was close to death, with stomach
cramps and cold stiff limbs. She recovered and convalesced at Dole, and
then at Juste’s house at Brevans nearby, until 2 February 1808. A page is
missing from the Journaux intimes for that crucial period of 20 November
to 10 December 1807—indeed the journal itself, even in its coded and
abbreviated form stops altogether on 27 December 1807 and only
recommences on 15 May 1811;
25
and the narrative of Cécile breaks off
inexplicably with Cécile/Charlotte hovering between life and death in
Besançon, and with an anxious narrator/Constant at her bedside.^26 The
possible explanations for such gaps and silences open a rich field for
speculation: did Charlotte panic in Besançon, issue threats, even try to
commit suicide? Constant dreaded her reaching Besançon, as his journal
shows, and he felt pangs of guilt at still being in Switzerland when she
arrived. Charlotte had now sacrificed everything—two husbands and her
reputation—for a man who was too spineless to leave a woman he no
longer loved: suicidal despair would be all too understandable. But there is
no hard evidence, and Constant and/or Charlotte (who was eventually to
inherit his papers after his death) seem to have wished things to remain
that way.
While Charlotte recovered from her illness at Brevans, Constant continued to work on
his manuscript, now entitled Wallstein (Schiller’s original title had been Wallenstein).
They arrived in Paris together on 9 February 1808, where he made further improvements
to the play and began to think about finding a publisher for it. He also returned to his
Benjamin constant 200