Benjamin Constant

completely. All I ask of you is that you never tell me when you’re

leaving.^11

The second letter, in which Madame Johannot refuses to see Constant for

the last time before he leaves Brussels lest she lose her self-control, ends

with the sentence: ‘Farewell. Be happy. If you should ever think about me,
forget my moment of weakness.’^12
The remarkable literary qualities of these letters put us irresistibly in mind of
Ellénore’s posthumous words to Adolphe:

What are you asking of me? That I leave you? Can’t you see that I

haven’t the strength to? ...Is there somewhere I can hide so that I

can live near to you but not be a burden on your life? ...It doesn’t

become you to be so lacking in feeling. You are kind. Your actions

are those of a noble and devoted friend.^13

And certainly Constant, who kept the letters until the end of his life, must

have known each line almost by heart. Two years later, when Constant

saw Madame Johannot again in Paris, he was once more captivated by her
and when he learned that she had subsequently left the city he experienced

‘emotions that were quite extraordinary in their overwhelming power and

sadness. It was a kind of premonition, one which her terrible fate was to

justify only too well’.
14
That last comment by Constant brings us back yet

again to the permanent association in his mind between women, parting
and death. But the case of Madame Johannot illustrates the development

of a by now equally strong psychological and emotional pattern. It is

perhaps going a little too far to describe Constant’s affair with her as ‘the

only absolutely calm relationship which Constant ever experienced’,
15
as

Sir Harold Nicolson did, but a letter from Constant to Isabelle de Charrière
of 4 March 1788 shows the depth of his gratitude to his ‘Belle Genevoise,

de Brusselles’, his beautiful Genevan woman from Brussels, for one thing

at least: ‘That woman loved me, truly loved me, loved me passionately,

and she was the only woman I’ve known who didn’t make me pay for her

favours with a great deal of suffering. I no longer love her, but I shall be
grateful to her for ever.’^16
Madame Johannot made no attempt to rope him in tightly to her, quite the reverse.
Being some eight or ten years older than him, she was mature and far-sighted enough to
realize that their affair must end sooner rather than later, and wished him future happiness
and success after his departure from Brussels. Her three letters, ‘tristes et tendres’,^17 sad
and tender, as they are and as Constant describes them in Ma Vie, stress the importance of
a clean break between Constant and herself. For his good and for her own, they must go

Benjamin constant 68