expense of others?’^71 Indeed one feature above all others dominates Isabelle de
Charrière’s writings: moral seriousness. Her novels generally have at their centre a moral
choice of which the consequences are then explored. Yet the inherent implausibility of
Benjamin Constant’s statement seems never to have been challenged, even though
elsewhere in the Ma Vie passage about her there is at least one other distortion of the
truth: in her youth Isabelle de Charrière certainly did not have ‘many passions’, several of
which were ‘unhappy’; apart from suitors whom she hardly knew there was only
Constant d’Hermenches, who never became her lover. Benjamin Constant the novelist
seems to have taken over here, and indeed Ma Vie does occasionally stray inexplicably
from meticulous veracity and gives a thoroughly retouched version of events.^72
In mitigation of his guilt—if indeed he ever was guilty of infidelity—Monsieur de
Charrière would no doubt plead that condign punishment had been subsequently visited
upon his head. Isabelle was not a happy wife and spread her unhappiness about her, as the
Protestant pastor of Colombier, Henri-David Chaillet (1751–1823), noted in his Journal
in 1783: ‘In one of her outbursts she maintained that virtue did nobody any good, made
nobody happy, neither the people tormenting themselves to have it nor those around
them.’^73 Pastor Chaillet keenly sympathized with her plight, and ends a remarkable
description of her by praising her fearless honesty, despite a barbed aside about her not
knowing what virtue was—a remark stemming perhaps from intellectual envy or
religious animus. Chaillet could ill-afford to feel superior to anyone: he was hauled
before an ecclesiastical court at about this time for a relationship he was having with a
woman parishioner, and his sanctimoniousness and hypocrisy had long since become
repellent to Isabelle de Charrière.^74 But this complex and highly articulate man has left an
image of Isabelle that is rich in significance. Was the tirade against virtue which Chaillet
mentions delivered for her husband’s benefit, a reminder that her fidelity had done her no
good in his eyes? She also attacked prosaic friendships in Chaillet’s presence: was it a
way of humiliating the neat, precise, unspontaneous, predictable Charrière, and a signal
that she too might one day go looking for someone else?^75
These were desperate years indeed for Isabelle de Charrière during which she must
have felt crushed by a malevolent destiny. Her youth was long since gone; she had made
what to many seemed an absurd choice of husband; she had devoted more than thirteen
years of her life to Charrière, and perhaps now had discovered that she had ‘wasted her
sweetness on the desert air’. She had no source of income but Charrière, and no home but
Colombier, a little Swiss backwater near Neuchâtel which, for Charrière’s sake, she had
made the focus of her life. Her anguish demanded a release, and after a decade of
inactivity she turned again to literature. By the time she met Benjamin Constant in 1787
she had attained notoriety throughout Switzerland with three short novels, Lettres
neuchâteloises (1784), Lettres de Mistriss Henley (1784) and Lettres écrites de Lausanne
(1785). The first was seen as a satire of Neuchâtel society and, worse, as a deliberate
affront to decency because of its portrayal of an unmarried and pregnant seamstress; the
second was a bitter and provocative story of a woman driven to despair by temperamental
incompatibility with her quietly reasonable husband; the third was a tender study of a
widowed mother struggling to find a husband for her daughter among Lausanne society, a
man who would both love her and not be deterred by her slender dowry. As Constant
remarks, 1787 would secure Isabelle de Charrière’s literary reputation with the
publication of Caliste, a continuation of Lettres écrites de Lausanne. She was already in
Isabelle de charriere 87