Bad Examples: Children, Servants, and Masturbation in Nineteenth-Century France

Be it in the interest of Rousseauian frankness or in pursuit of a succès de scandale, André Gide opens his autobiography, Si le grain ne meurt (If It Die, published in 1926), with a particularly provocative scene of child's play. The year is around 1874, and a five-year-old André and his little friend of the same age are hiding under a table covered with a tablecloth. Their activity is a cause of concern for André's nursemaid: "'What are you up to under there?' my nurse would call out. 'Nothing; we're playing.' And then we would make a great noise with our playthings, which we had taken along for the sake of appearances [pour la frime]." The word choice of the nursemaid's enquiry, "Qu'est-ce que vous fabriquez là-dessous?," suggests that the boys may be engaged in some form of pernicious yet purposeful work. André's response, meanwhile, is to assert on the contrary an absence of activity—the boys are doing "nothing"—which is apparently synonymous with play—"we're playing." Yet that play is, we quickly learn, a sham; the toys the boys shake have been brought pour la frime, as a decoy. In truth, of course, the boys are masturbating, or engaging in what André will later learn are called "bad habits" (mauvaises habitudes). This activity is, nevertheless, not entirely unlike play: it is itself a kind of fun ("we amused ourselves otherwise," Gide observes, teasingly),¹ and, as Michael Lucey points out, the boys' "way of noisily shaking their toys is inevitably metonymically associated with their masturbation."²

The substitution of autoeroticism for social play—the boys masturbated, Gide insists, together but separately, "beside each other but not with each other" (l'un près de l'autre, mais non l'un avec l'autre pourtant)³—is an important part of Gide's self-invention as troubled, different, or, indeed, deviant.⁴ Yet the particular pertinence of the question of work and play in this scene is indicated above all by the distinctly cipher-like character of André's playmate, that nameless "kid" (bambin) whose identity is determined only by his mother's occupation: he is, and will never be anything more than, "the concierge's son."⁵ The encounter under this table, in a smart Parisian apartment, is, in this sense, paradigmatic of interactions between masters, servants, and the children of both, and, more particularly, of the long nineteenth century's anxious imaginings of those interactions. Precisely one hundred years before the appearance of Gide's modernist memoir, Pauline Guizot's Éducation domestique (Domestic education, 1826), a puericulture manual in the form of an epistolary novel, presented a similar scenario. Mme de Lassay, one of the protagonists, seeks advice from a correspondent regarding the undesirable intimacy that has sprung up between her young son and the children of her gardener: "In general, I am afraid that he might contract a certain vulgarity of manners in the company of these children. My fears go even further. Children are so eager to tell each other, and to learn, what they ought not to know [ce qu'il ne faut pas savoir]!"⁶

One might well suspect that the forbidden knowledge alluded to by Mme de Lassay, and which she considers the gardener's children more likely to possess than her own, is of a sexual nature—though there is necessarily room for doubt, since, as D. A. Miller reminds us, "connotation enjoys, or suffers from, an abiding deniability"; and the sexual here is, at most, connoted.⁷ The paradigmatic character of Gide's centennial restaging of this anxiety may thus be said to lie in the simultaneous erasure of that epistemic margin and retention of its defining rhetorical feature: while there can be no confusion as to the boys' occupation under the table, that is, the phrase "we had what I afterwards learnt are called 'bad habits'" is nevertheless irreducibly an example of the slippery, connotative "rhetoric of allusion and metaphor" that characterized the nineteenth century's discursive handling of sexual...