Isabelle de Charrière and Benjamin Constant

Isabelle de Charrière and Benjamin Constant’s relationship serves as an example of how infidelity can be experienced not simply as a breach of marital or romantic exclusivity, but as a contest over influence and possession. Charrière ended the relationship because she could not tolerate feeling that Constant had been marked by the influence of Madame de Staël.

The Break with Constant

The book characterizes Constant as playing what it calls the feminine role between two women it describes as virile: Charrière and Madame de Staël. Its account locates the rupture in Charrière’s inability to accept the effect she believed Staël had had on him. The emphasis falls not on a narrated scene of separation or on the circumstances of the relationship, but on Charrière’s refusal to live with the sense that another woman’s influence had become part of Constant.

Influence, Possession, and Infidelity

The example appears within a broader discussion of how sexual relations can be understood through ideas of mastery and surrender. In this account, a husband may experience a wife’s lover as having taken possession of her, while she may imagine that intimacy with another man gives her a new kind of superiority over her spouse. Charrière’s break with Constant extends this logic beyond the sexual act: the perceived influence of a rival becomes intolerable because it seems to alter the person she loves and, through him, the relationship itself.

The passage also distinguishes between a woman’s infidelity and a man’s reciprocal infidelity, arguing that, under a relationship structured by submission, hers may appear to wrest her more radically from her husband. Charrière’s case gives that argument a different form: the central threat is not described as an affair, but as the mark left by Staël on Constant. The relationship thus illustrates the book’s concern with how intimacy can be organized around unequal claims to possession, and with how a third person’s influence can be felt as a challenge to those claims.