he had led three years earlier: visits to his family in Lausanne, visits to
prostitutes in Geneva (his sexual drive was undiminished, and he notes in
his diaries how essential frequent sexual intercourse is for his morale),
frustration at making little progress with his book amidst the gossip, late
nights and distractions of Coppet, inability to make a final break with
Germaine—his coded numerical journal showing rapid alternation
between the desire to leave and the desire to stay with her. Entirely
preoccupied with plans to travel and finally to break his ‘éternel lien’—his
unending bondage to Germaine de Staël—and with the political situation
in Europe (Napoleon was now planning an invasion of Britain across the
Channel), Constant failed to notice what was happening right under his
nose: Madame de Staël had fallen passionately in love with Prosper de
Barante, and Constant became aware of the fact on 18 September 1805. It
produced in him a predictable mixture of desire, resentment and paralysis
as to which course to follow. As he asked in despair in his journal on 3
October 1805, ‘Was there ever a man more undecided?’^83
Napoleon’s success on land at Ulm (15 October) and Austerlitz (2 December)—
despite a spectacular naval defeat at Trafalgar (21 October)—induced Austria to sign a
humiliating peace, and promised a widening of imperial tyranny in Europe. To complete
this year of dispiriting news and bereavements Constant learned on 30 December of the
death of Isabelle de Charrière during the night of 26–7 December 1805. The last letter she
ever wrote was to Constant, on 10 December 1805, urging him to take a spa water cure
for his recurrent eye troubles. In spite of everything they had maintained contact by letter.
Constant wrote in his diary on 30 December:
Death of Madame Charrière de Tuyll. I have lost in her another
friend who tenderly cared for me, a refuge if ever I needed one, a
heart which, though hurt by me, never turned away. How many
deaths I have already recorded in this book! The world is becoming
depopulated. Why go on living?^84At Coppet, meanwhile, Germaine had decreed that it was time for amateur
theatricals, and Constant was coerced into learning the part of Zopire in
Voltaire’s tragedy Mahomet: as he remarked in desperation in his diary on
5 January 1806, out of the previous 714 days, he had devoted only 259 to
work. He was wasting his life with Germaine, he would never have any
peace with her. He debated the alternatives with himself—marriage to
Charlotte, if she would still have him; staying with Madame de Staël but
on the understanding that for sex he was allowed to go elsewhere (sexual
relations between Constant and Germaine had long since ceased, no doubt
because of mutual physical antipathy); or keeping a mistress who could
The intermittences of the heart 191