Isabelle had lately recommended that Constant go and see ‘the author of Zulma’, that
is the novelist and essayist Madame de Staël who lived at Coppet, between Lausanne and
Geneva, adding waspishly, ‘She is a curiosity not to be missed’ (letter of 10 September
1794).^2 Madame de Charrière found her a garrulous busybody, a pretentious name-
dropper, whose written style she considered ridiculously overblown, at times to the point
of meaninglessness. But seldom in literary history can a depreciatory aside have so
backfired against its user. On 18 September Constant met Germaine de Staël at the home
of the Cazenove d’Arlens at Montchoisi. Germaine wrote to her current lover, the
Swedish Count Adolf von Ribbing, or Adolphe de Ribbing: ‘This evening I came across
a man of great wit here..., not very handsome but extraordinarily amusing.’^3 They got on
so well that Constant offered Madame de Staël his entire library of English books in the
event of his death and signed a declaration to that effect.^4
Born Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker in 1766, the daughter of Louis XVI’s Director-
General of Finances, the Genevan banker Jacques Necker (1732–1804), and Suzanne
Curchod (1737–94) (who had been prevented from marrying Edward Gibbon by the
intervention of the historian’s father, which occurrence had prompted Gibbon fils’s
famous comment, ‘I sighed as a lover; I obeyed as a son’), Germaine had known the
world of Parisian literary salons from her earliest years.^5 Like Constant, with whom she
shared a similar Swiss Protestant background, she had shown signs of remarkable
intellectual precocity. Later her extrovert, energetic and ardent nature, the inexhaustible
delight she took in reading and conversation and her many sexual liaisons were to bring
her fame and some notoriety. In January 1786 she had married Baron Eric Magnus Staël
von Holstein (1749–1802), Swedish Ambassador to France, and her salon in the Swedish
Embassy in the Rue du Bac had thereafter become a centre of moderate liberal thought.
During the Revolution she had begun to spend time at her father’s château at Coppet on
the shores of the Lake of Geneva, where she was to live for long periods in later years,
and in 1793 had stayed with a colony of distinguished French aristocratic émigrés at
Juniper Hall in Surrey.^6 When Constant met her in 1794 Madame de Staël was already
quite well known as a literary figure, having published controversial essays on Rousseau
and on French politics as well as Zulma, a short novel which had appeared in April 1794.
Germaine de Staël had traits in common with both Constant and Isabelle de Charrière:
she was highly intellectual, witty, unconventional, capable of overwhelming enthusiasms,
and had been an early victim of anglomania. She felt next to no affection for her cold and
spendthrift husband and had taken Count Louis de Narbonne as her lover only two years
after her marriage. Narbonne was to be followed by many others, of whom Ribbing was
only the latest.
Perhaps sensing that Constant, having experienced such intoxicating company, might
now slip away from her completely, Isabelle de Charrière wrote to him on 13 September
1794 trying to patch up their friendship, while not disguising how much the tone of his
letters had hurt her. She went too far herself, however, and her tone became embittered.
She tried again, this time with a fable in verse in the style of La Fontaine, Le Lion et le
Singe [The Lion and the Monkey] about their relationship.^7 In the meantime Constant was
already writing to tell Isabelle how impressed he was by Germaine de Staël as a
conversationalist, and accusing Isabelle of being despotic, of wishing to control his
freedom to think what he liked, of smothering him with her advice.^8 Isabelle had let
herself be driven by Constant’s exasperating treatment of her into overstepping the mark
Germaine de stael 153