not made any plans, but with some vague idea in my mind I
borrowed about 30 louis from Monsieur de Charrière.^12Isabelle de Charrière could not fail to recognize signs of greatness in
Constant which his letters from England would shortly confirm. While
there was still time, she continued to urge him to keep his mind free of
prejudices and tried by all means possible to encourage his natural
aptitude for dispassionate, sceptical investigation. This was not a form of
indoctrination, as Constant seems later to have believed: she simply
understood better than anybody else what he was like, and merely fostered
a tendency that was already apparent in him. It was obvious to her from
the start that he had the same unsettling gift of clear-sightedness as herself,
and that he must use it. Ma Vie gives here an incomplete and therefore
misleading picture of Isabelle de Charrière’s character and attitudes: we
see the scepticism clearly enough; what we are not shown is the moral
reasoning that always went hand in hand with that scepticism. Isabelle de
Charrière chafed against doctrinaire attitudes and placed such a high value
on intellectual independence because she was always intimately aware of
the mind’s multifariousness and changeability. All the venom which she
directed against prejudice and received ideas was distilled out of bitter
knowledge that a sensitive and receptive mind may discern vital nuances
in a person’s character or behaviour, nuances which could make all the
difference when it came to judging that person’s actions; but she realized
too that those fine discriminations are rarely noticed by the bulk of
humanity who are too stubborn or too lazy to abandon their crude
shibboleths and stereotypes. It was no mere wish to be different from
others, to shine or to appear superior that made her adopt a sceptical
position. Isabelle de Charrière reasoned invariably in moral terms, and her
wish for Constant would have been that he should maintain an open mind
because that would help him in the long run to be a better man. To view
her as an idle persifleuse, mocking merely for the sake of mocking and
encouraging the same vice in a younger man, would be as unjust as to
accuse George Eliot’s novels of encouraging moral indifference. Isabelle
de Charrière was aware that minds like hers and Constant’s belonged to
the same intellectual family as Montaigne: they were predisposed by the
colliding oppositions within them and by their own fluidity of mood and
thought to see complexity and mutability in all things and all people. If
there was one belief above all that Isabelle de Charrière shared with
Montaigne (and indeed Flaubert), it was that ‘l’affirmation et l’opiniastreté
Benjamin constant 94