man than her, not particularly intelligent but good-looking, had
inspired a great passion in her. I never got to learn all the details of
this passion, but what she did tell me and what I learnt from others
was enough to make me realize that her life had been greatly
disturbed by it and that she had been deeply unhappy. Her
husband’s displeasure had upset her peace of mind, and finally
when the young man in question had left her for another woman
whom he married, she had spent some time in the depths of despair.
That despair was put to good account and her literary reputation
profited from it, for it inspired the most delightful of her works,
Caliste, which is part of a novel published under the title Lettres
écrites de Lausanne [Letters written from Lausanne].^65I have quoted Constant’s statement at length because, since Ma Vie first
became accessible to scholars, it has been taken as the definitive
explanation of Isabelle de Charrière’s unhappiness. Philippe Godet,
Madame de Charrière’s biographer, suggested that she had fallen in love
with one Louis de Saussure (1747–1826),
66
and the most recent account of
her life and edition of Ma Vie by C.P.Courtney put forward a new
hypothesis which fits Constant’s story better, that the unidentified man
was Charles Dapples (1758–1842),^67 second cousin of Charles-Emmanuel
de Charrière. Certainly this may have been so—Dapples’s age, the date of
his marriage and Isabelle’s later reactions at the very mention of his name
are significant. The truth, however, may have been more complex than
this. Although Ma Vie, composed in around 1810–11, is often remarkably
accurate, it does on occasion seem to twist events and relationships for
reasons which remain puzzling: Constant’s account of Nathaniel May, his
English tutor, is one illustration of this. And it is possible that the passage
I have just quoted is not the whole story, indeed it may even have been a
deliberate reshuffling of the cards to tell a story less embarrassing to the
surviving relatives of Charles-Emmanuel de Charrière, who had died in
- Whatever Monsieur de Charrière was like when Isabelle left with him for Switzerland,
it seems that by the 1780s and after ten years of marriage he had begun to look elsewhere
for emotional and perhaps sexual satisfaction. A crisis occurred in Geneva, probably at
the beginning of 1784, while the couple were staying in the suite of rooms they rented in
the city. In his account of this, Philippe Godet—and all other commentators after him—
have followed Constant’s version of events and seen Isabelle de Charrière as the guilty
party.^68 One of the reasons for this has been the disappearance of all of Isabelle de
Charrière’s letters to her husband written from her self-imposed exile at Chexbres, a
village in the hills above the Lake of Geneva, especially those of her second stay from
Isabelle de charriere 85