May to September 1784. We only have her husband’s half of the correspondence, with its
many references to Isabelle’s indisposition and unhappiness and his wish for her to return
to Colombier: these have been construed as confirmation of Constant’s story. They could
however be read in a quite different light. An alternative hypothesis can be proposed, one
which accords much better with the characters of Isabelle and her husband as they
emerge from the recently published complete Correspondance of Isabelle.
What really happened could have been this. At the beginning of 1781, during
Monsieur and Madame de Charrière’s fifth stay in Geneva, Charles-Emmanuel fell in
love and perhaps even had an affair with Madame Alix de Saussure-Mercier (1765–
1828), wife of the Louis de Saussure mentioned by Godet. Isabelle de Charrière suffered
greatly and was physically ill, but her husband persisted in his infatuation during their
sixth stay in Geneva, January-May 1784, after which she went alone to Chexbres and
remained there till September, attempting to come to terms with her situation. She made
it clear that she would never return to Geneva, and in October–November 1784 Monsieur
de Charrière supervised the sale of the furnishings of their set of rooms there. There was
a recurrence of the crisis, for reasons about which we are ignorant, in July 1785, when
Isabelle de Charrière left Colombier with no particular destination in mind, then fell
seriously ill at Payerne, on the other side of Lake Neuchâtel, and convalesced there until
September. When she was fully recovered she left Colombier the following January,
again alone, and began an eighteen-month stay in Paris. It is possible that she went there
to seek out the man who had warned her against marrying Charrière in the first place,
Constant d’Hermenches, to whom she had stopped writing in 1775. If so, she must have
been very much distressed to learn that he had died twelve months before at his Paris
house, on 26 February 1785. Her consolation was to be meeting, quite by chance,
D’Hermenches’s nephew Benjamin in early 1787.^69
Certain remarks in Charles-Emmanuel de Charrière’s letters to his English friend
Dudley Ryder, First Earl of Harrowby (1762–1847)—letters out of reach of Monsieur de
Charrière’s family and kept in the Ryder family archives at Sandon Hall, Stafford—about
his deep feelings for Madame Alix de Saussure-Mercier and long friendship with her
reveal a side of him which until the late twentieth century had remained well hidden.^70 A
careful reading of Isabelle de Charrière’s correspondence concerning her promiscuous
servant Henriette Monachon (1766–?) is also instructive. Henriette gave birth to two
illegitimate children, the first a boy Prosper, by an unknown father, in 1792, the second
by a known father, a boy Jean-Louis Racine, born in 1796. Isabelle de Charrière defended
her wayward servant against all critics until in 1800 her attitude appears to have changed
virtually overnight, and she could hardly wait to be rid of her. Could it be that she had
discovered a relationship between Henriette and Monsieur de Charrière? There is, too, a
popular tradition in Colombier, the reliability of which it is notoriously difficult to
evaluate, of course, which maintains that Monsieur de Charrière has a descendant living
in the town to this day: as he had none by Isabelle de Charrière, this could only have been
the result of an illegitimate union.
From speculation and hearsay we can turn to the certainty of what is known about
Isabelle de Charrière’s character. She believed strongly, if not in the sanctity of marriage
vows, then in their inviolability, and she was firmly opposed to divorce, as she told
Constant d’Hermenches in a letter of 12 January 1772, adding: ‘Is it worth being happy at
other people’s expense in this short life? And is one really happy when it is at the
Benjamin constant 86