hesitation on Isabelle’s part, the wedding eventually took place at the village church of
Zuylen on 17 February 1771.
‘Joyless indeed, but safe’ would seem to sum up Isabelle de Charrière’s new situation.
There is no doubt that her reasons for finally consenting to the marriage were complex
and perhaps involved a degree of self-deception. Isabelle’s position at Zuylen Castle
since her mother’s death had been an acutely uncomfortable one: she had encouraged her
mother to be inoculated with the cow-pox which eventually killed her, and Isabelle’s
father had been utterly inconsolable. Monsieur de Charrière had been tutor to her
brothers, and she had turned to him more and more. He was very different from her, a shy
stammerer but very well read and generally thought of as dependable and a model of
unquestionable rectitude. He offered the prospect of a marriage built on shared literary
and musical interests, and a well-ordered life untroubled by any excess of passion.
Isabelle’s state of mind as she approached her thirtieth birthday was such as to welcome
so modest a proposal. It is clear from her letters that by then almost any reasonable offer
of marriage would not be refused, so pressing was her need to escape from the gloom of
Zuylen.
During her honeymoon Isabelle de Charrière wrote to her brother Ditie: ‘Do you want
to know what our only arguments are about? I often find Monsieur de Charrière too
ordentlyk, too overleggende, and he often finds me to be quite the opposite.’^64
‘Ordentlijk’, that is proper, correct in one’s behaviour, and ‘overleggende’, serious-
minded, given to lengthy deliberation about every course of action. In other words
Charles-Emmanuel de Charrière was as maddeningly unexcitable, staid and composed,
and as imperturbably dispassionate in his judgements as had been her father Diederik van
Tuyll. The only difference was that Isabelle had now thrown away her only chance to
escape from servitude to that kind of man. It is hard to imagine a more dreadful
realization. Small wonder that on her honeymoon she began to suffer from the first of
those vague but recurrent illnesses that would dog her for the rest of her life. Despite her
protestations about her feelings for Charrière, there is every possibility that Isabelle’s
illness was psychogenic, and perhaps as well were many of her ‘migraines’ of later years.
Under these unfavourable auspices her marriage began. She left Holland, never to return,
and after spending two months in Paris arrived at Monsieur de Charrière’s home, the old
manor of Le Pontet at Colombier, near Neuchâtel, on 30 September 1771.
In Ma Vie, where Madame de Charrière plays a role of central importance, Constant
gives his own version of the circumstances of her marriage and the events of the years
which followed:
When she was past 30, and after many passions, of which some had
been rather unhappy ones, she had married against her family’s
wishes the tutor to her brothers, an intelligent man, high-minded
and sensitive, but the most phlegmatic and unexcitable man one
could ever imagine. During the early years of their marriage she
had tried everything to get him to react as emotionally as she did to
things, and her torment at only succeeding occasionally had rapidly
destroyed the happiness she had looked forward to in what was in
many ways a union of two incompatible people. A much youngerBenjamin constant 84