who had been recommended to Juste, perhaps by Bridges, as a teacher of
good character, Nathaniel May (1761–1830), and who was at this time a
student at Lincoln College, Oxford.
72
According to Ma Vie Juste had
learnt his lesson as regards tutors, and employed Nathaniel May under a
much looser arrangement than that adopted with his predecessors. May
was to teach Benjamin Greek and English, it seems. He remained with the
Constant family for almost a year.
Thanks to the researches of C.P.Courtney who in 1966 edited Nathaniel May’s letters
to his sister Jane written while working for Juste de Constant, we have an accurate idea of
his character against which to measure the dismissive account which Constant was to
write thirty years later in Ma Vie:
Hardly had Monsieur May joined us on our our journey and my
father already found him laughable and insufferable. He confided
in me his impression of him, with the result that I considered my
new companion worthy only of mockery and perpetual derision....
Monsieur May spent a year and a half accompanying us in
Switzerland and Holland.... My father, who wanted only to be rid
of him, seized the first opportunity that presented itself and sent
him back to England.^73Nathaniel May’s letters tell a strangely different story. He speaks
repeatedly and in glowing terms of Juste’s politeness and efforts to make
everything agreeable for him, and appears quite unaware that, if we are to
believe Ma Vie, his host found him absurd. There is, perhaps, a solution to
this apparent contradiction in the character of Nathaniel May which
emerges from his correspondence with his sister. A devout Anglican with
Evangelical leanings (he was later to become more closely associated with
the Evangelical movement of which Nathaniel Bridges was a leading
Oxford representative), the 20-year-old May must have appeared
exasperatingly innocent, pedantic and humourless to the mercilessly ironic
and sophisticated Juste, who furthermore never made any secret of his
scepticism in matters of religion. In all probability May never realized
when Juste was being tongue in cheek, and his French was certainly too
poor to enable him to catch any ironic nuances or inflections. As a result
he appears to have sailed happily through the year he spent with Juste and
Benjamin, enjoying the sights of Europe and having plenty of leisure for
his own studies, entirely unaware of the mirth he continually inspired in
all around him. From May’s reports to his mother and sister it is also
evident that Benjamin profited considerably from his tuition (May’s letters
The grief that does not speak 37