Notes on Education

I've been reading a terrific bunch of biographies lately: Talleyrand, Thomas Paine, super-hunk Benjamin Franklin and now Madame Germaine de Staёl (courtesy of Dr. X).

I'll complain later about how these biographies have left me still confused about the French Revolution (hey, we're building a republic and people can vote and the King is on board, oh, no wait, there's Robespierre and...sacre vache!...blood in the streets and secret police and the guillotine and wtf...Napoleon as emperor...what happened?) and just offer up some juicy notes on the education of Benjamin Constant, or, how to raise an unhappy genius.

(Clumsily exerpted from Mistress to an Age by J. Christopher Herold)

When Benjamin was five.
Benjamin's first tutor regularly beat him, then smothered him with caresses to extract his promise not to tell. He also taught him a game--to invent an alphabet, a vocabulary, and a grammar. The language thus invented turned out to be Greek, and Benjamin had progressed in it considerably when [the tutor], caught in one of his sadistic fits, was chased from the household.

When Benjamin was seven.
His second tutor...was a fanatic atheist who tried to rape the daughter of Benjamin's music master and then took his pupil to live with him in a bordello.

When Benjamin was eight.
Benjamin was put to board with the music master who left him to his own devices where he spent eight to ten hours a day in a local lending library which specialized in antireligious propaganda and pornography. He read La Mettrie (good) and Crébillon (not so good).

When Benjamin was ten.
His next tutor was an ex-lawyer, escaping some scandal in France, who assigned Benjamin the task of copying one of his tracts. But he didn't like Benjamin's penmanship so Benjamin spent much of a year copying the Preface, over and over again.

Next came a defrocked monk who was good-natured and competent and so he was fired, when he then killed himself over an unhappy love affair.

Benjamin wrote: "What do I care what the ancients thought since I am not going to live with them...I sometimes see an English girl of my age whom I prefer to Cicero, Seneca, etc. She teaches me Ovid, whom she has never read or heard of but whom I discover in her eyes. I have written a little novel for her." He was, I repeat, about ten years old.

When Benjamin was twelve.
He learned to gamble. Not well.

When Benjamin was thirteen.
His father sent him to Oxford University. After two months they kicked him out, apparently because he was thirteen.

When Benjamin was fourteen.
He enrolled at the University of Erlangen, where he studied for eighteen months. During this time, he kept his first mistress. It seems that she was free with her favors to everyone but Benjamin.

When Benjamin was sixteen.
He began two years of study at the University of Edinburgh but lost so much money playing faro that his father sent him to Paris to live with the journalist Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Suard. Instead, Benjamin moved into a hotel and continued losing at the tables. So, his father enlisted another tutor who convinced Benjamin that his education could be best furthered if Benjamin treated them both to a bordello tour of Paris.

This is getting long so I'll just mention some highlights up to his twenty-first year. His mistresses increased in age from 27 to 35 to 60-something. He tried to gain the support of the mother of a girl he wanted to elope with; when the mother's lover found him on his knees in the mother's bedroom, he demanded an explanation and Benjamin, instead, drank a bottle of opium. He boozed it up with the lieutenant his father sent to bring him home, got him drunk, borrowed money and skipped to England. He bought two dogs and monkey. He traded the monkey for another dog. He got syphilis. While recovering, he read about fifty volumes of Restif de La Bretonne's naughty novels and started writing his History of Polytheism which is, apparently, still in print.

Those of us responsible for the education of children, please take note.