Hey, Mr. Postman

This 18th-century correspondence is the story of an unconsummated love affair between two highly intelligent and gifted individuals who didn’t seem to have anyone near them with whom they could share their innermost thoughts and feelings.

“People take it amiss that I want to know more than most women; they do not know that, being subject to a black melancholy, I have no health--nor, so to speak, life--except by continual occupation of my mind. By no means do I believe that a great deal of knowledge makes a woman more estimable, but I cannot do without learning things. . ,” wrote Isabelle de Charriere (1740-1805), known to her contemporaries as Belle de Zuylen after her ancestral home, Castle Zuylen, near Utrecht. Like all children of the European aristocracy at the time, she was educated in French and at home, but she also learned to speak and read English, to read German and Latin, and she studied mathematics and experimental physics. She also wrote poems, plays, stories, novellas and fairy tales, composed music and did portraits in pastels which are still in private collections. Her own portrait by Quentin de La Tour is in the book: in addition to everything else, she was beautiful.

Her first novella, “Le Noble,” was about a rebellious aristocratic heroine who threw all the family portraits from the castle window to make a platform and jumped out on them to run away with her lover. Evidently it embodied the restless dreams of privileged young women restrained by their class, their sex and lack of money of their own. Written nearly three decades before the French Revolution, when noble ancestors and parental authority were still sacrosanct, “Le Noble” was a scandalous book, and when Belle’s parents learned about it, they had it withdrawn from circulation.

She had many suitors, but they all drifted away--probably for the same reason as James Boswell, who met her in Utrecht in 1763 and proposed to her five years later. “She is a charming creature,” he wrote to a friend. “But she is a savante and a bel-esprit, and has published some things. She is much my superior. One does not like that.”

Baron Constant de Rebecque, Seigneur d’Hermenches et de Villars-Mendraz (1722-1785), was a landowner and an officer whose Huguenot forebears had left France and settled in Switzerland in the 16th century to escape religious persecution. His father, Samuel d’Hermenches, who led his own company in the service of Holland, was described by Voltaire as “the very devil of a general.” At 14, Constant was commissioned in his father’s regiment. At 21, he was wounded fighting the French in the War of the Austrian Succession, and thereafter he always wore a black band across his forehead to cover the scar. Twenty years later, fighting for the French against the Corsicans under Pascal Paoli, he led his troops with such courage and reckless audacity that it’s a wonder any of them survived. Voltaire wrote to his friend the duc de Richelieu: “A brave Swiss brigadier named M. Constant d’Hermenches, of the Jenner Regiment, who had done good service in Corsica, came to Ferney riding on the horse that had once been Paoli’s, and I think that he had ridden Paoli’s mistress as well. Those are two great claims to fame.”

A third claim to fame was Constant’s participation in Voltaire’s ultimately successful campaign to obtain posthumous justice for Jean Calas and restitution for his family. Calas was a Protestant merchant who had been broken on the wheel in 1762 by fanatical Catholics in Toulouse; religious fanatics, regardless of what path to salvation they follow, tend to arrive at murder. The Calas case is remembered to this day and reflects great credit on Voltaire and his allies. Like Voltaire, Constant wrote letters, brochures and pamphlets and made personal appeals to bring pressure on the king. Not everyone responded favorably: Constant told Belle that Voltaire had written to him “at the time, with real bitterness” to say: “A man of influence, to whom I had written a heart-rending letter about the abominable Calas episode, answered me: ‘What does it matter if we have broken one man on the wheel, when we are losing Martinique?’ ”

When there were no battles to fight, Constant managed his estate near Lausanne, raised his three children, wrote poetry, plays and pamphlets, composed music for the harpsichord, produced and acted in Voltaire’s plays at his sister’s private theater, traveled and wrote letters to his beautiful, brilliant young friend Belle de Zuylen, whom he always called Agnes, probably because no one else did. She addressed him as d’Hermenches.

They met in February 1760 at the Duke of Brunswick’s ball in the Hague, where Belle, a 19-year-old virgin, approached d’Hermenches, a 37-year-old married man separated from his wife and living as a bachelor. She was already drawn to him by his reputation as a man of the world and a dangerous libertine. “I was so struck by you at the beginning of our acquaintance,” she recalled many years later. “I thought you were a sorcerer, at the very least--appearing at just the right moment . . . you, your hand, the headband you wore. I wished for you to be there, and just when I wished it, there you were. . . . You took no notice of me, but I saw you. I spoke to you first--’Monsieur, you’re not dancing?’--to begin the conversation.”

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She also began their correspondence: three weeks after their first meeting she sent him an eloquent letter which swung wildly between come-hither and go-away. However, they did not meet again until two years later, when they both attended the British ambassador’s ball in the Hague. Six weeks after the ball she wrote him a nervous letter; she wasn’t sure she should write to him at all, but she did. She told him that a letter she had been writing to him had slipped out of her portfolio that evening (she didn’t explain why on earth she took her letters to a ball) and had been handed to her mother and how she had “spent the night in mortal fear. . . . The present letter may be excusable--it’s merely explaining to you my conduct--but . . . would it not be more honorable of me not to write? . . . Besides, it would almost oblige you to answer me; and I would just as soon you did not. If, however, you wish to anyway, answer me not by the post, but by the boat that comes directly to Utrecht and that leaves Thursdays and Saturdays.” As he had left for England, she didn’t receive an immediate reply, so she sent off another letter. “My God! How I regret having written to you!”

“What exquisite pleasure and surprise!” Constant wrote when he finally got her letters. “I have never felt so flattered . . . two letters! And from whom? From the person who fills my thoughts the most and on whom I counted the least . . . all the words of devotion, respect, passion, are too feeble to express everything that I feel for you. I am, until the last breath of my life, the most zealous of your friends and the most submissive of your servants.”

There followed 16 years of epistolary romance. “For as long as I have known you, I have been told a thousand times that you were the most libertine and the most adroit of men, and that a woman was guilty of the greatest imprudence in having any connection with you . . , “ she wrote to him in July 1764. “If I were to love, if I were free, it would be very difficult for me to be chaste. My senses are like my heart and my mind, avid to be pleased, sensitive to the most vivid and to the most delicate impressions.” In September she went further: “I fear that you have too great a share in my thoughts; that I am getting used to being preoccupied--too intensely preoccupied--with you. . . . If I do not marry your friend, if I am always thinking about you, then one day I will become your mistress.” Two months later, reporting that her parents will permit her to go to the Hague and she can meet him there, she writes: “Do you know what I am afraid of? Of approaching you provocatively, caressingly. . . . I don’t know what you would say, but be careful not to set my senses ablaze.”

D’Hermenches didn’t wish to seduce her. He replied, “[N]ever, never will you find me worthy of being your lover.”

For all their ardent expressions of longing, they met only about half a dozen times--in fact they seem to have deliberately avoided meeting. Belle remained a virgin until she married her brothers’ former tutor Charles-Emmanuel de Charriere at the age of 30. Constant d’Hermenches carried on amorous relationships with other women. The letters retain their own mysteries.

As Janet and Malcolm Whatley comment in their excellent introduction, the waning of the relationship between Belle and Constant “has its own beauty of cadence, its own poignancy.” After her marriage in 1771, he wrote more often than she did, although she did write to him to say, “There are no letters like yours.” After his own remarriage in 1776, he wrote to invite her and de Charriere to visit him and his wife at Hermenches, but as far as we know, she didn’t answer.

Reading letters from the past is time travel. The correspondence of these epistolary lovers gives us a strange, often moving and always entertaining story, enriched by significant historic incidents, the intellectual concerns and the way of life of the European nobility before the French Revolution. This is an essential reference work to any student of the 18th century; as a present, it is for history buffs with a romantic disposition.