It is likely that her long and, for some of the time, clandestine epistolary flirtation with
one of Europe’s most celebrated womanizers, Baron Constant d’Hermenches, was
undertaken in part at least to bolster her sense of her femininity. The affection and flattery
of Benjamin Constant’s uncle had perhaps been an antidote to an uncertainty about
herself as a desirable woman. But also the exchange of intimate letters was a safe and
unthreatening form of relationship, and above all a non-sexual one. Within it she could
tease and cajole her admirer as much as she liked, knowing that in any case
d’Hermenches was a married man and that the likelihood of their relationship ever being
physically consummated was remote: they seldom saw each other, and certainly not
alone. It is significant that the kind of husband she wanted at this time was a likeable,
witty and considerate companion who liked music, not a passionate lover. Indeed the man
Isabelle was eventually to marry had most of these qualities, though crucially not all of
them.
Before getting that far, she saw, throughout her twenties, potential husband after
potential husband either turned away by her father, or, like James Boswell, backing away
when they realized that Isabelle was unlikely to make a submissive and obedient wife.
All the time she continued to write to Constant d’Hermenches, who was intellectually and
emotionally a far more attractive proposition than any of them, though quite out of reach
and in any case unlikely to change his promiscuous ways. His letters to her from Corsica
show that as a letter writer d’Hermenches was her equal. He was there as a regimental
adjutant in the French Army engaged in suppressing Pascal Paoli’s uprising, and his
account of the 1768–9 campaign, with its Voltairean rapidity of pace and feeling for the
ironic and absurd—so like that of d’Hermenches’s nephew—was addressed to a woman
who had once contemplated translating into French Boswell’s strongly pro-Paoli An
Account of Corsica. This gives a added zest to his observations, as he makes a deliberate
point of confronting Isabelle’s idealistic theorizing with the shock of his own experience.
D’Hermenches was a relatively enlightened Swiss Protestant aristocrat and friend of
Voltaire—almost the only man in Isabelle’s life who could hold a candle to her either in
strength of mind or power of expression: the other was, of course, to be d’Hermenches’s
nephew Benjamin. And if we ignore the Lovelace in him, d’Hermenches’s letters reveal
to us a man of good sense who had Isabelle’s best interests at heart. When at the age of
30 and still unmarried she began considering the family tutor, the Swiss nobleman
Charles-Emmanuel de Charrière de Penthaz (1735–1808), as a possible husband,
d’Hermenches became alarmed. Pointing to the fact that Charrière was so poor that he
had to work for his living, he reminded her that she would be much worse off living on
her dowry with him in Switzerland than remaining at Zuylen as a spinster.^62 Whatever his
reasons for writing so forcefully to dissuade her from marrying Charles-Emmanuel de
Charrière (and he could well have known more about his countryman than he was willing
to disclose), d’Hermenches’s letter was a tactical blunder. Isabelle was already half in
love with Charrière. To emphasize only the importance of material advantage was just the
kind of statement to reinforce her determination to make any sacrifice for love, and to
consider arguments she or her family may have formulated to the contrary as base and
unworthy. She was furious with d’Hermenches, and it was two months before she could
bring herself to send him a short reply. In it she told him she preferred to ignore his kind
of reasoning, and instead to live in hope.^63 By 11 January 1771 a marriage contract had
been drawn up between her and Charrière and, despite some last-minute nervousness and
Isabelle de charriere 83