What Charlotte may not have known is that either during this stay or later in 1810 or
1811 Constant was working on the most permanent tribute to his relationship with her
that she could have hoped for. He was writing Cécile, the account of his struggle to free
himself from Germaine—fictionalized in the form of Madame de Malbée—and to reach
the haven of marriage to Cécile de Walterbourg, a thinly disguised Charlotte. This short
unfinished novel, which was published only in 1951, was based on memories but also no
doubt on diaries and letters from the turbulent years 1793–1808.^45 It probably developed
from the same embryo as Adolphe, the untitled autobiographical Urroman begun in the
autumn of 1806. Thanks to the remarkably precise dating of its sections or ‘phases’—
Constant calls them ‘epochs’—Cécile throws light on some of the more obscure areas of
Constant’s biography. But it also has great literary merit. Although its style is less tightly
controlled than Adolphe, and although it lacks the memorable aphorisms of that great
novel and its affecting intensity, Cécile does similarly explore the psychology of a weak
man unable to decide on the right course of action—in this case he has to choose between
two women—and who causes suffering by his hesitations and changes of mind.^46 The
narrative breaks off with Cécile on the point of dying from grief in Dole, although it is
clear from its opening sentence—‘On 11 January 1793 I met Cécile de Walterbourg who
is now my wife’—that she will eventually recover. That the story will end in triumph and
happiness is also evident from its Virgilian epigraph, ‘Italiam, Italiam’ (Aeneid III, 523),
taken from famous lines evoking the longing for a promised land that eludes the hero
Aeneas.^47 In Constant’s case that promised land was a peaceful and happy life married to
Charlotte. Yet even after that marriage had take place, the goal proved no less elusive.
On 21 March 1810 Constant made a provision in his will whereby he left Madame de
Staël or her heirs 80,000 francs. Over many years Constant and Germaine had pooled
their financial resources, but Constant had also borrowed 34,000 francs from her father
Jacques Necker to buy Hérivaux. A settlement was reached—albeit a humiliating one
which left him in debt to Germaine for the rest of his life—and on 14 April he was back
in Paris with Charlotte.^48 But after only a few weeks in the country at Les Herbages with
Charlotte, making improvements to his property, Constant was thoroughly bored. When
the call came from Madame de Staël, who was staying at the château of Chaumont on the
Loire, his capitulation was instantaneous. In spite of everything he accepted her invitation
and rejoined her. He stayed with her between 10 June and 14 July 1810 in order to help
her make last-minute corrections to the text of De l’Allemagne (On Germany), a book
based in part in their memories of Weimar.^49 De l’Allemagne was being printed by Mame
for the publisher Nicolle, and Germaine hoped that it would bring about a reconciliation
with the Emperor. However Napoleon was in no mood to trifle any longer with those he
considered to be troublemakers, and on 3 June 1810 he replaced Fouché, his Minister of
Police, whom he considered to be too soft on enemies of the régime, with Savary, Duc de
Rovigo. Fouché had generally tended towards leniency with Madame de Staël; Constant
knew Fouché well and had wrung some concessions from him in the past. That would no
longer be possible with the tough apparatchik Rovigo. Once again Constant’s thoughts
and concerns were inexorably taken over by Germaine and her world, by the pleasures of
intelligent, lively conversation with her and with her usual heterogeneous collection of
guests—among others the celebrated beauty Juliette Récamier with whom both Prosper
de Barante and Germaine were in love, a Russian prince, a baron from a Baltic state and a
young American.^50 On 1 July Charlotte escaped being burned to death in a fire at the
Italiam 207