Benjamin Constant

ends up by telling me how we can get back together again. I have

replied that when I saw at the beginning of the letter that she was

finishing with me I didn’t try to read any further for fear of feeling

more acutely what a treasure I was losing.

(Letter to Isabelle of 7 June 1794^84 )

And with this piece of calculated cruelty Constant brought to an end a

relationship which he would be grateful to renew many years later: even

so they continued to correspond that summer. On 5 September he wrote to
Isabelle: ‘Charlotte is free, her husband has remarried. But I am also free

not to marry her!’^85
Constant’s divorce proceedings opened during the second week in June. In the
meantime his correspondence with Isabelle de Charrière was becoming increasingly
acrimonious. He refused to condemn Robespierre outright, preferring to wait and see
what turn events would take, and adopting the line familiar from twentieth-century
history that one had to be either for or against the Revolution: ‘To occupy the middle
ground is to take up a worthless position; at this juncture it is more worthless than ever.
That is my profession of faith’ (letter of 7 June 1794).^86 Isabelle was outraged by such
intransigence when people were suffering on such a scale in France. In fact the argument
between the two friends is curiously reminiscent of a famous later quarrel between Sartre
and Camus about whether or not Stalin’s gulags really existed, with Isabelle playing the
humane and realistic Camus to Constant’s doctrinaire Sartre. Despite a subsequent
reconciliation, Constant and Isabelle were becoming estranged, a fact which clearly
caused Isabelle considerably more pain than Constant, spondence with Huber on the
subject of Robespierre’s recent decree on who was growing daily more adamantine in his
beliefs. He began a correreligion: Huber was of the same political faith.
Constant left Brunswick on 8 August 1794, and on his return to Switzerland passed
the counter-revolutionary army of the Prince de Condé. He was in good spirits during a
two-day stay with Isabelle de Charrière (23–5 August), who was pleased to find his
politics more moderate than the previous March (letter to Constant of 29 August 1794).^87
But too many hurtful words had been spoken for things ever to be quite the same between
them again. Yet it was characteristic of Constant to hold on to the relationship: he had a
horror of making any final break, an aspect of his nature which probably went back to his
childhood, but which often caused prolonged suffering both to others and himself. Marie
Louise Mauvillon, widow of his close friend, was aware of this aspect of his personality:

Come back [to Brunswick], she writes, come back with all your

weaknesses, your failings, with your indecision, your vacillation

and your oddity. If you lost a part of that, I would no longer know

you, I would no longer have the same confidence in you, or the

same pleasure...

(quoted in Constant’s letter to Isabelle de Charrière of 5 September

1794)^88

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