Benjamin Constant

to a rediscovered youth which will put the beauty back into my life

and make me happy once again.^66

How the ‘dawn’ and ‘rediscovered youth’ Constant describes here in

uncharacteristically lyrical vein were to come about he cannot have

known. But he was right in his intuition that he was intended for better and
greater things than he had so far been capable of. His exhausted contempt

for Court life had exaggerated his tendency to mordant cynicism; his

recent misery with Minna made him wary of any firm commitments; his

growing passion for political debate needed an outlet. He found temporary

relief at Colombier where he spent three weeks in July 1793 in an
apartment which Isabelle had found for him. Their friendship blossomed

once again and their political differences seemed less acute now that they

were in daily discussion. In August Constant found a publisher for her

Lettres trouvées dans des porte-feuilles d’émigrés in Lausanne. This

epistolary novel about young men and women separated by the
revolutionary wars and by opposing political allegiances was a typically

honest and fair response by Isabelle de Charrière to the sufferings of

individuals caught up in the current turmoil. Constant found nothing to

object to in it: quite the reverse, since he corrected the proofs and appears

to have collaborated in writing a manuscript continuation.
67
During the several visits to Colombier which Constant made that summer to escape
from the vexations of his relatives and from the tedium of Lausanne he met several of
Isabelle’s new circle of acquaintances, including Pierre-Louis de Malarmey de
Roussillon (1770–1802), a likeable young French aristocrat and émigré whom Isabelle
had befriended, and Ludwig Ferdinand Huber (1764–1804) and his future wife Therese
Forster (1764–1829), daughter of the Göttingen professor Christian Gottlob Heyne
(1729–1812). Therese Forster’s first husband, Georg Forster (1764–94), from whom she
was separated, had been one of the revolutionary leaders in Mainz, and she was shortly to
acquire a modest reputation herself in Germany as a novelist; Huber was a prolific writer
and journalist who would translate several of Isabelle de Charrière’s works into
German.^68 The couple lived in exile at Bôle near Colombier, and their sympathy with the
revolutionary cause immediately put them in Constant’s good books. When Isabelle had
the temerity to mention Huber’s sympathies to Constant, she received a sharp reminder
that, notwithstanding the Terror currently raging in Paris, he was still backing the
Revolution:

And what if Monsieur Huber were a Jacobin, what would be the

harm in that? Do you believe in the power of propaganda too, then?

And what propaganda is he spreading in Colombier? I’m really

cross to see you filled with such groundless fears. In Germany we

were treated to denunciations, warnings and unmaskings of that

Benjamin constant 146