feud with his uncle (this letter was written on 19 March 1786, the rift
dated from early May 1786) relations were somewhat strained between
them and Constant himself believed he had cause to feel aggrieved.
Rosalie, while sympathizing with her father’s position, continued to
correspond with her cousin, but was annoyed when it became obvious that
he was not going to keep his promise to return to stay with them in
Geneva. By now Constant for his part was tired of—and exasperated by—
the wider family’s demands on him. It was hard enough to have a father
like Juste: any further harassment was emotionally exhausting. In a letter
to his friend Isabelle de Charrière of 4 March 1788 he would speak of his
family as ‘uncles, cousins, the whole angry tribe of them’,^33 and later still,
looking back on this period of his life he would tell her that he had been
‘tortured by people who wanted to extract affection from me as one might
squeeze juice out of a lemon’.^34 The episode of the mémoire drove a deep
wedge between Benjamin and Samuel. At the same time it cannot but have
contributed in the long term to Constant’s permanent sense of revulsion at
emotional blackmail.
There was, however, another reason for Constant’s reluctance to leave Lausanne for
Geneva, and one which Rosalie and her father must certainly have been aware of.
Benjamin was in the process of making a fool of himself with a married woman almost
twice his age, Mrs. Harriet Trevor (1751–1829), wife of the British Ambassador to the
Court of Sardinia who spent most of his time in residence in Turin. At this point in Ma
Vie Constant really gets into his stride for the first time and provides a delightfully
amusing picture of the whole farcical enterprise. Not surprisingly, it was the heavy
gambling which took place at Mrs Trevor’s house a mile outside Lausanne that had
attracted Constant in the first instance. Then, seeing his hostess, a flirtatious
Englishwoman of 35 whose beauty was now fading, perpetually surrounded by half-a-
dozen young English admirers—Lausanne was of course at this period virtually an
obligatory stopping-point on the Grand Tour—Constant decided to tell her that he loved
her and to ask for her love in return. Mrs Trevor replied to his letter offering him
‘friendship’, not ‘love’. Whereupon he caused an extraordinary scene at her house,
rolling on the floor and beating his head against the wall, refusing to let Mrs Trevor go
near him, threatening to kill himself because all she would offer him was de l’amitié. And
for three or four months he stuck to his role as star-crossed lover, coming to believe in the
part he was acting, ‘growing more and more in love every day because every day I came
up against a difficulty I myself had created’.^35
Unusually timid for a young man of his sexual experience, Constant continued to
argue about the terminology of the relationship and contented himself with a chaste kiss
on her lips. In the meantime Mrs Trevor looked on at this extraordinary performance and
little by little assumed a part in the drama herself, weeping when he wept, moved by the
great passion she was apparently inspiring in this strange young man. Carried away by it
himself, Constant became jealous of a young Englishman who had not the slightest
interest in his paramour. Constant challenged the hapless man to a duel when he assured
Isabelle de charriere 75