aristocracy which was epitomized in the personality of her father, a thoroughly
respectable man but dour and stern. In later years Isabelle—or Belle de Zuylen, as she
was for long known to literary historians—inevitably came into conflict with the rigid
system of beliefs and attitudes of his formidable figure. An unusual and highly intelligent
spirit, from early in her life she felt imprisoned in such deadening surroundings.
As the six volumes of her brilliant and extensive Correspondance reveal,^55 Isabelle
was still essentially the same when she met Benjamin Constant. She resembled him in
character to a degree that must have astonished them both. In an early written self-
portrait, the Portrait de Zélide,^56 it is possible to glimpse already the compulsive talker
and arguer, the woman of penetrating intelligence, the reckless, unconventional and self-
willed daughter. What we cannot see, but what the several non-verbal portraits of her
show, notably the pastel by Maurice-Quentin de La Tour of 1766, is her beauty.^57
Benjamin Constant’s uncle, Juste’s brother, David-Louis Constant d’Hermenches (1722–
85), to whom, characteristically, Isabelle had introduced herself in 1760 at a ball in The
Hague, had been so taken by her looks and quick-wittedness that for the next fifteen years
he had carried on a passionate correspondence with her.^58 James Boswell who met her in
1762 had thought of marrying her, but had eventually cried off, more than a little
intimidated by her disconcertingly powerful mind to which nothing, he feared, would be
sacred.^59
There is a remark by the Princess Halm-Eberstein in Daniel Deronda that sums up
Isabelle’s plight quite admirably: ‘You may try—but you can never imagine what it is to
have a man’s force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl.’^60 That
cry from the heart from George Eliot would have been applauded by Belle de Zuylen,
who, a hundred years earlier, had wrestled with similar problems, and indeed had an
extraordinarily similar temperament and attitude to life. Isabelle, as her written self-
portrait suggests, found it impossible to assume the passive role expected of a woman by
her family and by society. Her character was too strong. Like the pitiless author of ‘Silly
Novels by Lady Novelists’, Isabelle could not bring herself to suffer fools of either sex
gladly. But she was similarly passionate and vulnerable, and certainly experienced a
degree of ostracism from those who found her too outspoken, and perhaps too honest and
clear-sighted, both in her novels and in her life. ‘Friendship never had a temple more holy
or more worthy of it than Zélide’, she had written in her self-portrait. This was indeed to
be true throughout her life, and her happiest attachments were to be the—in all
probability—sexually unconsummated one with Benjamin Constant, and a series of close
friendships with younger women, of a warmth and intimacy akin to that of a mother-
daughter relationship (Isabelle was unable to have children), occasionally something
more. She has left us a lively satirical tale about the absurdity of pride of ancestry, Le
Noble, conte moral, with the deliberately provocative epigraph from La Fontaine ‘On ne
suit pas toujours ses Aïeux, ni son Pere’, ‘One does not always follow one’s ancestors or
one’s father’, and which the Van Tuyll family immediately tried to have withdrawn from
circulation when it appeared in 1763 in the Journal étranger of Amsterdam.^61 Whatever
one’s views on the autonomous nature of art, it would take a degree of perversity not to
recognize in Le Noble (along with all the other things undoubtedly there—the impatience
of a progressive mind with social prejudice and so on) a very strong autobiographical
element.
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