Ludwig Ferdinand and Therese Huber who were living at Bôle near
Neuchâtel, and sent a note on 26 January 1796 to Isabelle de Charrière
asking if he could go and see her since he was so near. By return he
received the following tart reply:
I like neither your way of life nor your friends, neither your politics
nor the politics of those with you, and I have no wish to argue with
you any more. Now I’ve said it. I’m obliged to you for a delightful
winter. Two years ago this winter and earlier I was grateful to you
for very pleasant hours, days, months. They cannot come back
again. I wrote to you at the beginning of the Revolution, ‘If you go
to Paris and if you become involved in some clique or other, it will
be the end of our friendship’. Eighteen months ago I begged you
not to let yourself get recruited by anyone in Germany. Now you
have joined someone’s ranks, or rather you are under her wing, and
there you reason and write articles. You are no longer my kind of
person, and since you have no need of me, we’d better leave things
as they are. Be happy—that is what I wish for you with all my
heart.^38Why did Constant invite such a rebuff? Earlier in the same letter Isabelle
says:
I’ve heard you say sometimes, ‘I never finish with anybody’. On
other occasions it was, ‘I feel like writing to Madame de
M[arenholtz, i.e. Charlotte]. Did you say to yourself today, ‘I feel
like writing to Madame de Charrière’? ‘But what is the point?’, I
used to ask you apropos of Madame de M. ‘I tell you I want to
write to her’, you said, ‘I never finish with anybody’.^39Isabelle de Charrière’s remark takes us once again to the heart of
Constant’s personality, and to his horror of any final separation which
would be something akin to the ultimate separation of death. Although
more vulnerable than Constant in other respects, Isabelle did not at least
have this particular Achilles’ heel. He could never finally close the door
on his relationship with her, even in the letter of farewell he sent her on 26
March 1796:
I shall never stop loving you.... I may have wronged you by my
behaviour towards you because I am both sharp-tongued and
disorganized by nature, but my feelings for you have alwaysGermaine de stael 161