but I believe the C++ string class essentially is some fancy dressing on a const char array that can make your life easier. I may be wrong on that though.
not a const - because you can write to it (to the class, not to the underlying array directly)

and the class actually wraps dynamically allocated array of chars - growing string as needed and removing from the used the headake of reallocing array as string grows

also standard does not require that the internal storage be continues - so the string could actually consist of several "frames"