writing. Up to now the only serious pieces he had composed had been Les Chevaliers,
written to please Juste, and the hack work he had undertaken on Roman military
discipline for his uncle Samuel. The translation of Gillies’s History had likewise been
written as an earnest of better academic things to come, and was also a form of placatory
offering to Juste. Now, in more than one sense of the phrase, Constant was striking out on
his own. When in Ma Vie he attributes the fundamental change in him which led to his
English escapade to long conversations with Isabelle de Charrière, we must take him
seriously. What, then, was the content of those intense discussions, and what ideas and
attitudes is Isabelle de Charrière likely to have revealed in them?
Partial answers to the first question are to be glimpsed in Ma Vie. The second question
demands a brief examination of Isabelle de Charrière’s novels and other writings. Our
solutions to these problems will lead us later towards answering perhaps the most
intriguing and important question of all: what was Isabelle de Charrière’s role in
Constant’s development as a novelist? As far as the first enquiry is concerned, it emerges
clearly from Ma Vie that Isabelle de Charrière—not surprisingly given the state of her life
and of her marriage—was wont to rail against dependence on others, a theme likely to
elicit warm agreement from a Constant hitherto so abjectly dependent on a capricious
father. No doubt this is what Constant is referring to when he says, ‘My head had been
turned...by all the sophistry I had repeated and heard repeated about independence’.^9 But
enforced dependence was merely a sub-section of Isabelle’s principal indictment of
society—that people seldom take the trouble to think, but fall back on platitudes; that
they unquestioningly accept stale ideas and outworn conventions through a mental
indolence which was anathema to Isabelle de Charrière’s own energetic temperament.
She had always taken the line that no one was going to tell her what to think, and she had
paid the usual penalty in terms of isolation and social ostracism.
As the epigraph to the 1795 German translation of her novel Trois femmes Isabelle de
Charrière chose Cogitans dubito, a phrase with obvious Cartesian echoes which we could
perhaps gloss as ‘When I reflect, I doubt’, or, more loosely but perhaps closer to the spirit
of it, ‘The more I think about things, the more sceptical I become’. And indeed she did.
Isabelle de Charrière’s conversations with Constant in the spring of 1787 were an
incitement to him to think for himself, to take nothing on trust. Even in the midst of his
most strenuous efforts to win the hand of Jenny Pourrat in marriage, Constant tells us,
the person who...was really on my mind and in my heart was
Madame de Charrière. In the midst of all my romance-filled letters,
my invitations to elope, my threats of suicide and my theatrical
attempt at poisoning myself, I spent hours and hours, whole nights
talking to Madame de Charrière, and in the course of those
conversations I forgot my worries about my father and my debts,
Mademoiselle Pourrat and the rest of the world. I am convinced
that without those conversations my behaviour would have been
less foolish. All of her opinions rested on contempt for custom and
convention. We outdid each other in making fun of the people we
saw; we became intoxicated with our humour and our scorn for the
rest of the human race, and as a result of all of this I acted as IBenjamin constant 92