Benjamin Constant

busy doing good to others, showing so much generosity, such

considerate and sustained politeness at social gatherings, and so

much charm, naturalness and openness when she is with her closer

acquaintances. She is the second woman I have met who could take

the place of the whole world for me, who could be a world unto

herself for me: you know who the first was [i.e. Isabelle].... She is

a being apart, a superior being such as one might come across

perhaps only once in a hundred years.^14

But the superior being who was the subject of this panegyric stubbornly

refused to reciprocate Constant’s feelings. Germaine was amused but

unmoved by his spaniel-like devotion to her, and even thought him a little
deranged. His reaction was to provoke embarrassing scenes which put her

off him still more. In the meantime he was working for her, going on

errands to various parts of Switzerland, probably in aid of French émigrés,

while writing to her several times a day to declare his love for her. He

began work again on his book on religion, telling Isabelle on 3 December
1794:

What you say about your reasons for wishing that I would

undertake to write a book that was less vast in its scope is very

pertinent and very sensible. But the only thing for which I have

ever felt any really sustained interest is the very thing that you have

never been able to get interested in yourself, and if I don’t finish

this one, I don’t think I’ll ever write another.^15

In December 1794 they corresponded on the subject of Kant’s notion of
duty, which was to be the unusual starting point for Isabelle’s novel Trois

femmes,^16 but henceforth their letters were to be about intellectual or

literary matters rather than personal. Meanwhile the curious comedy went

on day after day with Madame de Staël, with Constant watching and

adoring, and Germaine gradually more and more touched by such
attention, despite her calling him ‘singularly ugly’ in a letter to the absent

Ribbing.^17
In February 1795 Constant moved into Madame de Staël’s house at Mézery, but he
was still without any tangible reward for all his despairing love and daily histrionics.
Germaine continued to find him physically repulsive. Matters came to a head at the end
of March when one night the servants at Mézery were awoken by screams of pain from
Constant’s room. They found him writhing on his bed and foaming at the mouth.
Constant asked one of the house guests, mostly French émigrés, to tell Germaine that he
was dying for love of her. She rushed to his side and pleaded with him to live: he kissed

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