Mlle de Zuylen and Hermenches

Mlle de Zuylen and Hermenches are joined by a twelve-year correspondence and an unusually strong mutual interest, but their friendship cannot become a marriage. In the account of her life, this enduring bond reveals the difference between the man who truly interested her and the respectable husband she eventually chose, and it foreshadows the loneliness that marriage would deepen.

The Correspondence and Its Limits

Brilliant, cultivated, intelligent, and ardent, Mlle de Zuylen astonished Europe. She rejected more than twelve suitors, while other possible matches fell away; Hermenches alone interested her. Yet marriage to him was out of the question. Their connection instead took the form of a twelve-year correspondence, a sustained friendship that accompanied her studies but did not satisfy her wish to become a woman and a free being. She called “Virgin and martyr” a pleonasm, giving sharp expression to the constraints under which she lived.

Marriage and Contrast

At thirty, Mlle de Zuylen married M. de Charrière. She valued the “honesty of heart” and “sense of justice” she found in him, and initially resolved to make him “the most tenderly loved husband in the world.” The match thus began not as simple indifference but as a deliberate hope that affection could be made reciprocal. Later, however, Benjamin Constant recounted that she had tormented her husband in an effort to draw reactions from him equal to her own; his methodical impassivity resisted her.

Shut up with M. de Charrière in Colombier, among a senile father-in-law and dull sisters-in-law, she grew bored and disliked the narrow-mindedness of provincial society in Neufchâtel. Her days narrowed to washing household linen and playing “Comet” in the evening. A young man briefly crossed her life but left her lonelier than before. Against this domestic routine, the earlier correspondence with Hermenches stands as a bond that had mattered deeply, yet could not offer the life or freedom she sought.

From Unfulfilled Attachment to Solitude

Mlle de Zuylen turned ennui into literary work, writing four novels about the customs of Neufchâtel, even as her circle of friends contracted. One of her works portrays the long sadness of a marriage between a lively, sensitive woman and a good but ponderous, cold man: conjugal life becomes a chain of misunderstandings, disappointments, and petty resentments. The account presents the fiction as closely bound to her own unhappiness. After falling ill and recovering, she returned to a life of prolonged, accompanied solitude.

Hermenches did not become her husband, and the evidence does not describe the later course of their relationship beyond the twelve-year correspondence. Its significance lies in that limit: the man who interested her most remained outside the marriage that determined her daily existence. Her studies and friendship with him could no longer satisfy her, while marriage to another man failed to answer her ardor. The relationship therefore illuminates the gap between intellectual and emotional affinity and the narrow marital choices available to her.