researches on religion. While Germaine de Staël led a life of extreme brilliance in the
best circles of Viennese society that winter, meeting that epitome of ancien régime
cosmopolitanism and sophistication the Prince de Ligne and falling passionately and
unhappily in love with Count Maurice O’Donnell, an officer in the Austrian army,
Constant’s life was as humdrum and domestic as he could wish now that the crisis
seemed to have passed. With Madame de Staël hundreds of miles away, he could in her
absence now contemplate an altogether quieter future life with his ‘angel’. During March
he became fascinated by phrenology—a branch of science which was to have an
enormous following later in the century—and attended a course of lectures by its German
inventor, Dr Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828), whose serious attempts to understand the
workings of the human mind, Constant told his aunt Anne de Nassau on 7 March 1808,
had met with the customary arrogance and scorn which the French reserved for new and
original ideas, especially when they came from Germany.^27 Under Napoleon the idea of
the superiority of the French over other nations had become yet more deeply entrenched,
and the generosity of Madame de Staël towards Britain and Italy in Corinne and later
towards Germany in De l’Allemagne (and the respect for differences between cultures
which characterized her friends at Coppet) was attracting more and more official
disapproval in France.
This period of marking time came to an end for Constant on 11 April 1808 when the
Reverend Pierre Boislesve, Doctor of Canon Law to the Archbishopric of Paris, declared
Alexandre Du Tertre’s marriage to Charlotte von Marenholtz, which had taken place in
Brunswick on 14 June 1798, null and void in the eyes of the Catholic church because
Baron von Marenholtz was still alive in 1808 (he was to die on 18 December 1808). In
addition Du Tertre was fined 30 francs to be given to the poor of the parish of Notre
Dame.^28 The way was now clear for Constant to marry Charlotte, and at the end of May
the couple went to Juste’s house at Brevans to make the necessary arrangements. On 5
June 1808 they were married in secret in a Protestant ceremony performed by Pastor
Jean-Henry Ebray (1769–1840) of the French Reformed church in Basle, although the
religious ceremony and accompanying marriage certificate had no legal validity in France
until a civil ceremony was performed.^29 With any ordinarily constituted man this might
have meant the end of his relationship with another woman. With Constant, however,
things were seldom so simple. Germaine de Staël had left Vienna on 22 May and was
returning to Coppet: Constant felt compelled to see her again in order to bring things to a
satisfactory end. On 27 June 1808 Constant and Charlotte left Brevans and travelled
together as far as Concise in the Pays de Vaud. There they parted for the time being and
Constant went with Auguste de Staël to meet Auguste’s mother. By the beginning of July
Constant and Germaine de Staël were in residence again at Coppet. Charlotte patiently
spent the summer travelling within Switzerland before returning to Brevans at the end of
September. She was not to have Constant to herself again until December.
During that summer of 1808, which perhaps marked the highwater mark of the Coppet
group and its intellectual activities,^30 Madame de Staël worked on the book about
Germany which she had been planning since her stay in Weimar, and for which her visit
to Vienna had been a further stimulus.^31 She also tried to get over her unreciprocated love
for Maurice O’Donnell. At the same time Constant was on the point of finishing
Wallstein and profited whenever he read it aloud to them from the comments of Madame
de Staël and several German speakers at Coppet—the playwright Zacharias Werner
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