8 ‘ITALIAM, ITALIAM’ (1806–1812)
Constant was not a natural novelist in the way that he was a natural diarist,
historical scholar or master of invective. Apart from one attempt at novel-
writing in collaboration with Isabelle de Charrière—the Lettres de
d’Arsillé fils
1
—he had hardly ever touched the genre. But now something
out of the ordinary, an event of the greatest importance in his life
compelled him to write the narrative of how he had found, lost and found
again the perfect woman companion. We no longer possess the text that he
wrote that autumn in Rouen, which doubtless underwent transformation
after transformation through multiple drafts. Critics and scholars have
examined minutely the evidence of entries about it in the Journaux intimes
and have often come to conflicting conclusions as to whether this
unknown work, this Urroman was an early version of Adolphe or of
Cécile.^2 What seems most likely is that the first draft began—as do both
Adolphe and Cécile—at a small German court in the late eighteenth
century, and that as Constant retraced mentally the events of his life at
Brunswick and his first infatuation with Charlotte, the misery of his
subsequent years and his present unhappiness with Germaine de Staël
crowded in upon him. From a factual, historical account of separation and
eventual reunion—in all probability something along the lines of the
beginning of the Cécile we know—it became a less serene and altogether
more tragic story about a man unable to finish with a woman he no longer
loves. As Constant wrote that November and read his autobiographical
novel aloud to Germaine—herself of course a novelist and currently
completing Corinne, her best work—his text undoubtedly underwent the
wholesale changes and rearrangements all of Constant’s works were to
know. On 7 November he discovered that the Vicomte Du Tertre had
burnt a letter he had sent Charlotte: in panic and disarray he told Germaine
of his feelings for Charlotte and perhaps more.^3 Madame de Staël’s anger
was terrible. It then emerged that Du Tertre might be prepared to consider
Benjamin constant 196