Mme de Charrière and Benjamin Constant

Mme de Charrière and Benjamin Constant’s relationship occupies a turning point in Simone de Beauvoir’s portrait of a gifted woman confined by marriage: their passionate attachment interrupts years of boredom at Colombier, but its end does not release her into a wider life. Instead, she withdraws further into the place she had once found unbearable, making chosen endurance a limited substitute for freedom.

Before Constant

Brilliant, cultivated, intelligent, and ardent, Mme de Charrière had astonished Europe and rejected more than twelve suitors. The one man who interested her, Hermenches, could not become her husband; their twelve-year correspondence and her studies eventually ceased to satisfy her. At thirty she married M. de Charrière, valuing his honesty and sense of justice and initially resolving to make him a tenderly loving husband.

That hope foundered in the routine of Colombier. Her husband’s methodical impassivity and the narrowness of Neuchâtel provincial society left her bored; household linen and evening games filled her days. She wrote four novels about local customs, but literary activity did not dispel the sense that marriage had become a chain of misunderstandings and disappointments. Her biographer describes the daily routine and her husband’s unresisting temperament as a perpetual pause no activity of hers could fill.

The relationship and its ending

Benjamin Constant entered this stalled life and passionately occupied Mme de Charrière for eight years. The relationship offered a powerful attachment within a life otherwise marked by accompanied solitude. Its duration matters: this was not a passing interruption but an extended emotional center, one that made the contrast with Colombier’s routine unmistakable.

The relationship ended when Mme de Charrière, too proud to wrest Constant from Mme de Staël, gave him up. Her pride hardened after the loss. She wrote that Colombier had been abhorrent and that she had decided not to leave it again, resolving instead to make it bearable. The retreat that followed was thus connected both to the end of the relationship and to her deliberate refusal to pursue Constant at another woman’s expense.

A chosen confinement

Mme de Charrière closed herself within Colombier and did not leave her garden for fifteen years. She applied the Stoic precept of trying to conquer the heart rather than fortune: unable to remake her circumstances, she sought to alter her relation to them. In this sense, the relationship’s ending changed the meaning of her confinement. The place she had experienced as intolerable became a prison she chose, and choice offered a narrow form of agency without removing the underlying limits.

Her withdrawal was not simple contentment. She understood that resignation was a kind of deception, and became so secluded and severe that others found her frightening. She welcomed immigrants arriving in Neuchâtel, protected and guided them, wrote elegant, disillusioned works, advised young women, taught Locke to Henriette, and acted as a protector to local peasants. Yet even these generous activities existed within a life she had deliberately narrowed; her self-control could seem chilling, as though she moved through an empty room.

Significance in the account

The years after Constant’s departure are presented as arid rather than reconciled. Mme de Charrière and her husband grew old beside one another while remaining worlds apart; the house is rendered as a closed tomb, with the husband absorbed in mathematics and the rhythm of threshing continuing outside. The relationship had briefly occupied her passionately, but its end did not overturn the marital structure or open a new public life. It left her with a constrained strategy: to endure the life she could not transform by withdrawing from the world around it.

Simone de Beauvoir uses this relationship within a broader argument about women’s freedom and the conditions that restrict it. A person’s existence, in her existentialist account, is realized through projects and movement toward an open future; when a woman is confined to repetition and made dependent on a man’s terms, her possibilities are narrowed. Mme de Charrière’s choice to remain at Colombier is therefore both an act of self-command and evidence of how little room remains to act. Her story gives intimate form to the difference between choosing one’s confinement and being genuinely free of it.