These are two posts I've been planning to write for a million years and never get around to, anon š
The dyslexia topic - his specific spelling style and the "mistakes" he makes aren't reflective of dyslexia. Like @18thcenturythirsttrap mentions, the "correct" spelling hasn't been fixed yet by the AcadƩmie franƧaise.
Bernard Vinot says he's being "creative" with his spelling by randomly doubling consonants where people in his era didn't do that, which is something I would have ascribed to autism - not caring about prescribed rules and making your own instead. But I discovered something else. Claude-Antoine Prieur, who was born and raised in the same region (Auxonne) as Saint-Just stayed in (Decize) until he was around 9yo, also doubled his consonants (and has poor writing in general):
(Bouchard's biography on Prieur de la CĆ“te d'Or, 1944, p. 24.)
This makes me wonder two things: 1) if the doubled consonants are the sign of their different regional accent and/or 2) if it's just how French was taught in that region:
See? It's close. They were both in Bourgogne. (Carnot too, but Carnot doesn't make mistakes because he's a Perfect Nerd like Robespierre. Tldr: Carnot and Prieur were also very likely autistic. The CSP was autistic-on-autistic violence.)
That's more a feeling I get as an autistic person myself because Saint-Just is unfortunately very good at concealing who he truly was. But that already might be a sign.
See, his oldest (Gateau, Lejeune) and closest (Philippe and Ćlisabeth Le Bas, but also Gateau) friends who left testimonies all agree on one thing: Saint-Just is very hard to understand, and his personality seems split in two. Or rather, he has a mask he puts on when he's in public. A public persona. It seems to confuse many of them. Nodier rambles it made him "untrue" to himself (though he also argues that via physiognomist nonsense) but that doesn't sound very strange to most autistic people. We learn to mask who we are, pretend to be someone we aren't. It's exhausting, but if you've always done it, it comes "almost" naturally. If Saint-Just was autistic, it would explain that ease in shifting between his private and public personas - which often seemed "terrifying" to some of them, or "like he committed violence against himself" (Lejeune).
Saint-Just was extremely sensitive to rejection and criticism. His letter to Daubigny, which we were never supposed to see as it was an unsent draft, says a lot about his inner turmoil. The letters to his editor Beuvin also give some hints to his personality. He can't wait to be older, and he wants to be taken seriously more than anything. When you've hurt his feelings, you're basically dead to him. He doesn't forgive. It's extremely likely that Desmoulins and HĆ©rault, considering their personalities, made jokes intended to he light-hearted that Saint-Just either didn't understand or took as insults. You don't casually joke with him. You don't toy with him. He's not going to smile and take it. He chafes at authority, especially if it's unearned. Unlike Prieur for example, he doesn't defer to his elders just because they're his elders. This is what makes them see him as arrogant and haughty and prideful - that plus the mask he keeps on.
Moreover, for someone who put so much importance in friendship, he actually had very few close friends. He rarely let people in. The fact he avoided the Duplays to go directly to Robespierre's room says something about his social skills. Robespierre seemed actually much more at ease in social settings and when he needed to do networking. Saint-Just despised small talk and gossip. (I'm sure that made BarĆØre both mad and fascinated.) He rarely intervened at the Convention outside of planned speeches/reports. When he presided, he also hardly spoke - unlike others who interjected more often. Though he did go at the Jacobins, he didn't frequent them quite as much. He seems to surround himself with solitude and mystery.
There's also this anecdote told to Fleury by an old woman who used to be a friend of Saint-Just's sisters back in the day. She reports that, as a kid most likely, he was always in the charmille, where he read or walked alone reciting out loud from his books, then sometimes showed up to say "ominous things" and make predictions, and that the girls admired him yet were also terrified:
(Ćdouard Fleury, Saint-Just et la Terreur, vol. 1, 1852, p. 15-16.)
(That honestly feels like my own childhood lol.)
Some describe him as talking "like an oracle", and BarĆØre says "he deliberated like a vizir":
(Memoirs on Carnot written by his son, vol. 1, 1861, p. 342.)
...which never made a lot of sense to me, unless he attributes to vizirs some mystical aura? But maybe it's completely unrelated, I'm just not sure what he means there tbh.
I might be forgetting things, but to sum things up, that's basically what I think. And it's finally the first time I manage to write it all out and post it - at least a first draft. š© I could wait to rewrite this with my old draft, but that's the precise reason why I never got to post that one and it's been in writing process since December 2021. So let's just take these two imperfect posts instead because I'm exhausted š©š©š©
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