are of course in English): ‘[Constant] labours very hard and has made
great improvement. He is far advanced in the Greek, understands the
English very well and speaks it very fluently’.
74
But there were also
indications of Benjamin’s increasing unruliness, behaviour that only Juste
could deal with: ‘Young Constants passions are sometimes very strong[;]
it is only the presence and authority of his Father that can govern him. If
he will not conduct himself well with me I shall not stay with him long’.
75
Some months later things were going rather better:
The Young Gentleman has given me little reason to complain for
some time[;] he has a great friendship for me but nobody ever has
or ever will be able to preserve any influence over him but his
Father, who keeps him in very great awe. I was never required to
be answerable for his conduct and was only required to assist him
in his studies.^76At some point soon after 23 May 1781 Nathaniel May left Juste’s service,
apparently by mutual agreement. Indeed the account given of May in Ma
Vie, after such a rogues’ gallery of bad tutors, was perhaps distorted for
aesthetic effect, since, long after it was written and thirty-five years after
the events it described, Constant sought out Nathaniel May, who was by
then vicar of Leigh in Kent, and entrusted to his temporary safe-keeping
his most precious possession, the manuscript of his book on polytheism on
which he had been working more than half his life.^77 Faintly ridiculous he
may have been, but May’s integrity had clearly remained fixed in
Constant’s memory.
Just before Nathaniel May returned to Oxford and while he was still helping Benjamin
with his work (they were staying in the garrison town of Geertruidenberg), Benjamin fell
in love, it seems, for the first time. The object of his affection was the daughter of the
commanding officer David Grenier (1721–90), a friend of his father’s. Too shy to tell her
of his feelings for her, interrupted when she began questioning him about his love,
Benjamin was soon obliged to leave Geertruidenberg to follow his father back to
Switzerland.^78 During that autumn of 1781 Benjamin took lessons from a local pastor,
Philippe Sirice, known as Le Doyen Bridel (1757–1845), later noted for his work on
Swiss folklore and patois. Once again the arrangement was unsuccessful. Bridel,
according to Ma Vie, was a self-important pedant who assumed an air of familiarity
inappropriate to his dealings with the son of a Vaudois aristocrat and which Juste soon
found unacceptable. Bridel was dismissed.^79
All Juste’s efforts to secure for his son the degree of personal attention that only a
private tutor could give had now failed. Perhaps only May had achieved anything with
Benjamin, but his obtuseness made him in the long term unsuitable in Juste’s eyes.
Having avoided all educational institutions for so many years he was at last forced to
Benjamin constant 38