For a time the affair proceeded satisfactorily, no serious cloud appearing on the horizon until the death of M. de Staël. Then, of course, Madame de Staël was free to marry her lover, and Benjamin Constant proposed that she should do so. But she would not. One reason was that she did not wish to change a name that her writings had made famous; another, and perhaps a weightier one, that, though she loved Benjamin, she had no confidence in him--'Constant the inconstant' was inconstant still. Though he loved Madame de Staël, he loved other women too. His intimacy with Madame Talma, the actor's wife, was notorious, and was not the only intimacy of the kind with which rumour credited him. Altogether, he was not the sort of man whom any woman could marry with any certainty that he would make her happy. So Madame de Staël refused to marry Benjamin Constant, and with her refusal their relations entered upon a fresh and interesting phase. Henceforward the story is one of subsiding passion on his part, and very desperate efforts on hers to fan the dying embers of his desire. Again and again he tried to break with her; again and again she overwhelmed him with her reproaches, and brought him back, a penitent slave, suing for the renewal of her favour. The time when these things happened was the time when her salon at Coppet was at the zenith of its renown. The story is told for us by Benjamin Constant himself, in his 'Journal Intime,' a diary not written for publication, but published, long after his death, in the _Revue Internationale_,[6] in 1887. The tone, at first, is that of a man whom lassitude has overtaken after elegant debauchery. Benjamin Constant is only thirty-seven, yet he already feels himself an old man, whose powers are failing, who is no longer capable of strong emotion, or even of taking an intelligent interest in life. He writes, in fact, as if he were very tired. When something happens to remind him of his old attachment to Madame de Charrière, he writes thus: 'It is seven years since I saw her--ten since our intimacy ended. How easily I then used to break every tie that bored me! How confident I was that I could always form others when I pleased! How clearly I felt that my life was mine to do what I liked with, and what a difference ten years have made! Now everything seems precarious, and ready to fly away from me. Even the privileges that I have do not make me happy. But I have passed the age of giving up anything, because I feel that I am powerless to replace anything.' [Illustration: IN THE FOREST OF SAUVABELIN, ABOVE LAUSANNE] He describes--sometimes with a languid resignation, and sometimes with a peevish resentment--Madame de Staël's repeated endeavours to drag him, a more or less reluctant victim, at her chariot wheels. This is a very typical entry: