hard to visualize the frustration and the confused emotions of a man who
cannot remember his own mother—Tolstoy, who lost his mother when he
was 23 months old, was a prey to similar feelings.
14
But there was clearly
more to Constant’s attitude than this.
Undoubtedly the strangest hiatus in Ma Vie is the chronological jump between its first
and second paragraphs. Is it a case of bad memory, or of nothing worth recounting? Or a
deliberate suppression? One’s suspicions are increased by that altogether remarkable
second paragraph. It comes to the reader out of a total and unexplained void, and the
story it contains clearly burned in Constant’s memory some forty years later with an
incandescence all of its own. Suddenly we see Constant being savagely beaten by his
German tutor—possibly one Friedrich Jakob Ströhlin (1743–?), if C.P.Courtney’s
tentative identification is correct;^15 his sobs are suppressed by his tutor taking him in his
arms and caressing him; the tutor fears Constant will denounce him to his father;
Constant promises not to betray him, and adheres faithfully to the promise. In the latter
part of the paragraph the same evil genius devises a game, one in which his pupil
Constant ‘invents’ the Greek language and generates a Greek grammar. At this point the
tutor’s ill-treatment of Constant is discovered through no fault of the boy himself, and
Ströhlin is dismissed by Constant’s father.
It must be said at once that there is something strangely familiar about the story. We
find similar elements in Montaigne’s account of his own upbringing in the essay ‘De
l’institution des enfants’ (‘On educating children’). There we have a comparable
inventiveness in pedagogy, attributed to Montaigne’s father, who takes on a German tutor
to teach his infant son Latin; by the age of 6 Montaigne can speak nothing else; he is
taught Greek by his father as a game:
We tossed our declensions back and forth to each other like those
who, by means of certain board games, learn arithmetic and
geometry. For amongst other things he had been advised to get me
to enjoy learning and having to do work without using any form of
constraint, so that I did it of my own volition, and to allow my
mind to develop gently and freely without coercion or the
imposition of discipline.^16Even Ströhlin’s beatings are like a scene from the Marquis de Sade’s
Justine ou les malheurs de la vertu (1791)—and Constant almost certainly
knew the writings of Sade. We must ask the question, therefore: is
Constant’s story true? And I believe the answer we must give is: perhaps
true, but arranged, arranged in conformity with Constant the writer and
self-explorer’s wishes and intentions. In Ma Vie as in other of his
autobiographical works, there is clearly a desire, akin to the
psychoanalytic ‘talking cure’, to liberate himself from past sufferings and
nightmares through writing about them, so that he can at last become fully
master and maker of his own history, as the title Ma Vie indeed suggests.
The grief that does not speak 15