ABSTRACT
It is a relief among so many biographical notices that emphasize an allegedly pernicious influence exercised over Constant by Isabelle de Charrière to come across one at least that is more clear-sighted. It is Edouard Laboulaye (1811-83) who, in his long 1861 article, rightly stresses the positive and sustaining nature of her affection. Noting that in the letters they subsequently exchanged there was ‘the tone of genuine friendship’, he adds that as they were both enemies of ‘platitudes’, Isabelle naturally encouraged in the future author of Adolphe ‘that boldness of thought, … that need to go deeply into matters which explains the lucidity of his thinking and the clarity of his language’.2 In Ma Vie it is the ‘boldness of thought’ that Constant chooses to bring out:
Madame de Charrière had such an original and animated way of looking at life, such contempt for received ideas, such vigour in her thinking, and such a powerful and disdainful superiority over ordinary mortals that, disdainful and out of the ordinary as I also was at 20, I found a hitherto undreamt-of pleasure in talking to her. I unhesitatingly abandoned myself to the delight of conversation with her.3
