an atheist and libertine, a vain and stupid man who began by trying to seduce the
daughter of Benjamin’s music teacher, Ferdinand-Philippe-Joseph Staes (1748–1809) and
ended by moving into a brothel in order to be nearer to his pleasures, taking Benjamin
with him.^62 At this point, during the summer of 1776, Juste learned of de La Grange’s
depravity and took his son away.^63 This early awakening of Benjamin’s sexual curiosity
was soon followed by several months of intensive reading, chiefly of erotic novels and
atheistic works. During this period he lived with his music teacher, played truant from
lessons with his other tutors and waited for his father to make more permanent
arrangements for his education. Juste, displaying an unrivalled capacity for having the
wool pulled over his eyes, chose as tutor for his son a Monsieur Gobert, a Frenchman and
former lawyer who had been forced to leave France for one shady reason or another, and
was now proposing to set up a tutorial establishment in Brussels with a mistress he
pretended was his housekeeper.^64 As a result Benjamin spent his days as unpaid copyist
of a manuscript work composed by Gobert. By the time a furious Juste de Constant took
him away from Gobert, however, Benjamin had had the last laugh: his handwriting was
so bad and he had made so many mistakes that he had got no further than the preface.^65
In late 1778 and early 1779 Juste tried once again to educate Benjamin himself at his
La Chablière property outside Lausanne (at this period Juste owned four properties
around Lausanne—La Chablière, Le Désert, Beau-Soleil and La Vallombreuse).
Although he was extremely intelligent and widely read, Juste again appears to have found
the task irksome, and this time chose an ex-monk, Monsieur Duplessis, to take over from
him.^66 Duplessis had many good qualities: he was learned, witty and kind, but he inspired
only contempt in Juste because he was not strict enough with Benjamin. Nonetheless
under Duplessis’s guidance Benjamin made some progress as they both followed Juste
around Europe, from Switzerland to Brussels and then on into Holland. After little more
than a year Juste’s patience was exhausted and he dismissed Duplessis who, according to
Ma Vie, later went mad after an unhappy infatuation and shot himself. Thus in 1780
ended the first phase of Benjamin Constant’s formal education.^67
The impact of such a succession of experiences on the young Constant is summarized
in Ma Vie. After recounting the Gobert episode Constant states that he was ‘convinced
for the third time that those whose job it was to educate me and put me on the right path
were themselves very ignorant and immoral men’.^68 On each occasion the father who had
proved so poor a judge of character in the first place was later forced to rescue his son
from the consequences of his folly. But in the cases of Duplessis and Benjamin’s next
tutor, the Englishman Nathaniel May, a curious complicity formed between father and
son. Juste encouraged Benjamin to look down on the man he was employing to teach
him. The problem seems to have been that Juste could never be content to leave his son
without an image constantly before him of what he should become. That image was, of
course, largely one of himself, Juste de Constant, superior, ironic, a man to command
men, an enemy of ‘mediocrity’. Benjamin, for the reasons outlined earlier, was
throughout his boyhood perpetually anxious to please and placate a father he loved but of
whom he was often more than a little afraid. He tried to accept his father as a model for
himself, and also absorbed Juste’s high expectations of future intellectual glory for him.
This anxious dependence, alternating with outbreaks of rebelliousness—a pattern which
was to repeat itself so often in his later life—was firmly established by the time Benjamin
had reached early adolescence. His father was not disappointed in his literary hopes for
Benjamin constant 34