Bernardin de St. Pierre

by Arvède Barine

CHAPTER II. Period of uncertainty—Voyage to the Isle of France—Acquaintance with J. J. Rousseau—The Crisis.

He felt about for some time longer before finally taking up the pen. In vain his friend Hennin urged him: "Above all, do not keep saying as you have done hitherto, 'I will write, I will publish;' write, publish, and leave it to your friends to make your work a success." Bernardin de Saint-Pierre hesitated: "I am occupying myself," he replied, "in putting in order the journal of my travels; not that I wish to become an author, that is too distasteful a career and leads to nothing, but I imitate those who learn to draw in order to adorn their rooms." (Letter of the 29th of December, 1771). He speaks to him in the same letter of getting the Government to give him a mission to the Indies, so that he may be able to regale the ministers with a few more memorials on politics or strategy.

He hesitated because he did not know how to set to work. He thought he saw a manner of describing nature for which he knew of no models; and instead of trusting to himself, he appealed to his writers, who could do nothing for him. In the Harmonies de la Nature, his last great work, into which he put all his fragments, there is a rhetorical lecture upon the rules of landscape painting, which bears witness to the care with which he had analysed the methods of Virgil. In it Saint-Pierre explains to some imaginary pupils the means employed by the poet to obtain the desired effect: "When Virgil tells us, 'The ash-tree is very beautiful in the woods, the poplar on the banks of the rivers,' he puts the tree in the singular and the site in the plural, in order to enlarge his horizon. If he had put the vegetation in the plural, and the sites in the singular, they would not have had the same scope. He would have contracted his different scenes if he had said: 'The ash-trees are very beautiful in a wood; the poplars on the bank of a river.' The lines of the picture once fixed, Virgil throws the flash of light upon his landscape, and it appears either sad or smiling. He succeeds in enlivening it with bees, swans, birds and flocks; or in saddening it by painting it desolate. A landscape is always melancholy when it includes nothing but the primitive forces of nature."

It is a subtle piece of observation, but the feeling for nature which was awakening in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and for which he was striving to find expression, was more complicated than that of Virgil. Neither the Eclogues nor the Georgics taught him anything about what were to be the great novelties of descriptive literature. The ancients did not feel this need for precise and picturesque detail, which has enabled us to take the portrait of a corner of country as we do that of a person, with the same minutiæ, and the same care about the resemblance. On the other hand, they had little of the intuition for that mysterious correspondence between the scene and the spectator, for that reciprocal action of nature upon our feelings, and of our feelings upon the manner in which we look upon nature that in our day gives so personal an emphasis to literary pictures of scenery, and can lend a tragedy to the description of a bit of meadow. The only one of the Greek or Latin writers, who has described the relations of our souls with the world around us, has done it magnificently; but Bernardin de Saint-Pierre had not read him. He was a Father of the Church of the fourth century, Saint Gregory of Nazianzen, some of whose pages make us think of Chateaubriand.

"Yesterday, tortured by my regrets, I seated myself under the shade of a thick wood, eating my heart in solitude; for in trouble this silent communing with one's soul is a consolation that I love. From the tree-tops where the breeze murmured, and the birds were singing, gladdened by the sunlight, there fell a soft influence of sleep. The grasshoppers hidden in the grass echoed through the wood, a clear stream softly gliding through its cool glades bathed my feet; as for me, I remained pre-occupied with my grief, and had no care for these things; for when the soul is overwhelmed with sorrow it cannot yield itself up to pleasure. In the tumult of my troubled heart, I spoke aloud the thoughts which were contending within me: 'What have I been? What am I? What shall I become? I know not. One wiser than I knows no better. Lost in clouds I wander to and fro; having nothing, not even the dream of what I desire.'"[9]

One might urge that Bernardin de Saint-Pierre had not read the poets of the sixteenth century any more than the Fathers of the Church. It was not the fashion of his day, and he was not the sort of man to go and explore the libraries; he was too much occupied in making discoveries in the fields. Like almost all his contemporaries, he jumped from antiquity to the seventeenth century with only Montaigne in the interval. After Homer, Virgil, the Gospel, and Plutarch, his intellectual sustenance had been Racine, La Fontaine, Fénélon, and at last coming to his contemporaries, Jean Jacques Rousseau. In vain he questioned them upon the idea which pursued him; not one of them gave him a satisfactory answer. Racine, who they say was enchanted with the valley of Port Royal, had had no room in his tragedies for word pictures. La Fontaine had more the feeling for the country than for nature. Fénélon saw the woods and the fields from the point of view of the ancients. We have purposely not mentioned Buffon; Bernardin did not understand or appreciate him.

There remained Rousseau, who loved the beauty of the universe with all his passionate heart; but the fine descriptions of Rousseau appear in his posthumous works—in the Confessions and the Reveries which were published, it is well to insist upon this, nine years after the Voyage to the Isle of France. The celebrated landscapes in La Nouvelle Heloïse, which Saint-Pierre had certainly studied, have about them something conventional, which makes them appear cold. Call to mind Saint-Preux in the mountains of Valais:

"Here immense rocks hung in ruins above my head; there high and thundering cascades drenched me with their thick mist; again, an eternal torrent would open beside me an abyss, of which my eyes did not dare to sound the depths. Sometimes I lost myself in the obscurity of a thick wood. Sometimes on emerging from a ravine my eyes would suddenly be rejoiced by a pleasant plain. An astonishing admixture of wilderness and cultivation showed everywhere the hand of men, where one would have thought that they had never penetrated: beside a cavern you found houses, dried vine branches where one only sought brambles, vines growing upon landslips, excellent fruit upon rocks, and fields in the midst of precipices."

In this bit, almost all the adjectives are abstract. The torrent is eternal, the meadow agreeable, the fruits excellent. It is still in the style of Poussin, and nothing in it foretells the pictures in the manner of Corot and Théodore Rousseau, which Bernardin de Saint-Pierre was soon to give to us. Let us say at once, in order to establish the claim of the author of Paul and Virginia to the character of an innovator and pioneer, that the posthumous works of Jean Jacques only give us his own impressions of a picture which he suggests rather than shows to us. The immortal summer night of the Confessions, on the road near Lyons, or the walk to Ménilmontant of the Reveries, after the vintage and through the leafless country, leave in the memory recollections of sensations rather than pictures. One recalls a breeze of voluptuous warmth, a soft light of autumn; but the physiognomy of the country escapes us. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre will be the first to paint it for us accurately. Just because he is much less great than his glorious predecessor, we must give him his due, and insist upon his originality.

Thus thrown upon his own resources, and finding by great good fortune no one to imitate, he decided to take up the pen, and wrote, as well as he could, and with many erasures, his Voyage to the Isle of France. He had succeeded in sufficiently clearing up his ideas to know very well what he wanted to do. He had two objects in view: in the first place he wished to awaken a love of nature amongst the public. "By dint of familiarising ourselves with the arts," he says in The Voyage, "Nature becomes alien to us; we are even so artificial that we call natural objects curiosities." He was shocked that the multitude who became enamoured of the works of men could pass by the works of God without seeing them, and he boasted for his part that he "preferred a vine-stock to a column ... the flight of a gnat to the colonnade of the Louvre." Moreover, he could not understand how one could separate man from his surroundings, from the air which he breathed, the soil which he trod upon, the plants and animals which were about him. "A landscape," he says in his preface, "is the background of the picture of human life."

The second object of his work was in his eyes still more important than the first. The awakening of a love of nature amongst men was not to be a simple artistic pleasure. Saint-Pierre designed to make use of it to teach these same multitudes to seek evidences of the Divinity elsewhere than in books. He wished to restore to the France of the philosophers the sense of the presence of God in the universe, and the best way to do it seemed to him to be to draw attention towards the marvels of creation. No argument in his eyes was worth a day passed in the fields in looking at what was about him and at his feet. "Nature," he wrote, "presents such ingenious harmonies, such benevolent designs; mute scenes so expressive and little noticed, that if one could present even a feeble picture of them to the most thoughtless man, he would be forced to exclaim, 'There is some moving spirit in all this.'" In another place he apologises himself for having written about plants and animals without being a naturalist, and he adds: "Natural history not being confined to the libraries it seemed to me that it was a book wherein all the world might read. I have thought I could perceive the tangible evidence of the existence of a Providence, and I have spoken of it, not as a system which amuses my mind but as a feeling of which my heart is full."

We notice in the two last lines the avowal, as yet timid and obscure, of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's favourite maxim, the key to all his schemes philosophical, scientific, political, or educational. He always strove, and more and more openly as he gained reputation and authority, to persuade the world that feeling is ever a better guide than reason in all questions, and that it gives us greater certainty. He himself gave an example in applying it to everything, and in particular to the truths of religion. We should say truthfully, that he was sufficiently of his day, sufficiently imbued with the spirit of the encyclopædists to believe himself already conquered if he appealed to reason in favour of God. He thought it safest to address himself to the feelings of the reader rather than to his intelligence, in order to reconcile him with a personage so little in favour.

This fine programme was unhappily very indifferently realised in the Voyage to the Isle of France. Bernardin had first and foremost an immense difficulty to contend against in the absence of a picturesque vocabulary. "The art of depicting nature is so new," he said in the course of his narrative, "that its terminology is yet uninvented. Try to describe a mountain so that it shall be recognisable: when you have spoken of the foundation, of the sides, and the summit, you will have said everything. But what variety is there in those forms bulging, rounded, extended, here flattened, there hollowed, &c.! You can find nothing but paraphrases. There is the same difficulty with the plains and valleys.... It is not astonishing, then, that travellers give such poor accounts of natural objects. If they describe a country to you, you will see in it towns, rivers, mountains; but their descriptions are as barren as a geographical map: Hindostan resembles Europe; there is no character in it."

There are, in fact, accounts of travels of the eighteenth century in which one might confound a landscape in the East, with one in Touraine. Not only they did not see so much difference as we do: they wanted words to give to each its own idiosyncrasy. To Bernardin de Saint-Pierre is due the honour of having begun the work of enriching the language, which was one of the glories of the Romantic School.

Having to some extent overcome this first difficulty, Bernardin encountered a second before which he succumbed. That was his inexperience, and the timidity of a novice who dares not let himself go. His narrative is dry and often tiresome. There are here and there fine descriptions, written with a certain breadth and musical expression, but the whole only creates an interest because it is an attempt to achieve something new. The picture of the port at Lorient is one of the best things in it. It is at the beginning and it makes one hope for better things.

"A strong wind was blowing. We had crossed through the town without meeting any one. From the walls of the citadel I could see the inky horizon, the island of Grois covered with mist, the open sea tossing restlessly; in the distance great ships close-reefed, and poor sailing luggers in the trough of the sea; upon the shore troops of women benumbed with cold and fear; a sentinel on the top of a bastion surprised at the hardihood of those poor men who fish with the gulls in the midst of the tempest."

There is grandeur and emphasis in this passage. It has character, to use Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's expression; the sea which he paints for us is the real ocean, and the ocean as seen from the coast of France on a stormy day. He is no less happy in describing familiar things; witness his description of the fish market. "We returned well buttoned up, very wet, and holding on our hats with our hands. In passing through Lorient we saw the whole market-place covered with fish; skates white and dark-coloured, others bristling with spines; dog-fish, monstrous conger-eels writhing upon the ground; large baskets full of crabs and lobsters; heaps of oysters, mussels, and scallops; cod, soles, turbot, in fine a miraculous draught like that of the apostles."

The tempest at sea in the Mozambique Channel is perhaps the best page in the book. In order to enjoy it thoroughly, we must turn first to the classical tempests before Saint-Pierre's time, which are still more featureless, more destitute of character, than the landscapes. The following example is taken from Telemachus: "While they thus forgot the dangers of the sea a sudden tempest agitated the heavens and the sea. The unchained winds roared with fury in the sails; dark waves beat against the sides of the vessel, which groaned under their blows. Now we rose on to the summits of the swollen waves; now the sea seemed to disappear from under the ship and to plunge us into the abyss." When one has read one of these accounts one has read them all. The same terms, few in number, serve to fashion indefinitely the same images of groaning vessels which roaring winds precipitate into the abyss, and it is not even necessary to have seen the sea in order to acquit oneself quite respectably: it is enough if one consults the proper authors. Not a word of the description which we have been reading belonged really to Fénélon. He took it in its entirety from Virgil and Ovid:

... stridens aquilone procella.

Velum adversa ferit.

(Virgil. The Eniad.)

Sæpe? dat ingentem fluctu latus icta fragorem.

(Ovid. The Metamorphosis.)

Hi summo in fluctu pendent; his unda dehiscens
Terram inter fluctus aperit.

(Virgil. The Eniad.)

Now compare with this literary tempest the realistic description of Saint-Pierre, taken from hour to hour, minute to minute, and put down in a note-book as the rolling of the vessel permitted.

"On the 23rd (June, 1768), at half-past twelve, a tremendously heavy sea stove in four windows out of five in the large saloon, although their shutters were fastened with crossbars. The vessel made a backward movement as if she were going down by the stern. Hearing the noise, I opened the door of my cabin, which in a moment was full of water and floating furniture. The water escaped by the door of the grand saloon as though through the sluices of a mill; upwards of twenty hogsheads had come in. The carpenters were called, a light was brought, and they hastened to nail up other port-holes. We were then flying along under the foresail; the wind and the sea were terrible....

"As the rolling of the ship prevented me from sleeping, I had thrown myself into my berth in my boots and dressing-gown; my dog seemed to be seized with extraordinary fear. While I was amusing myself trying to calm him, I saw a flash of lightning through the dim light of my port-hole, and heard the noise of thunder. It might have been about half-past three. An instant later a second peal of thunder burst overhead, and my dog began to tremble and howl. Then came a third flash of lightning, followed almost immediately by a third peal of thunder, and I heard some one in the forecastle cry that the ship was in danger; in fact, the noise was like the roar of a cannon discharged close to us; there was no reverberation. As I smelt a strong odour of sulphur, I went up on deck, where at first I felt it intensely cold. A great silence reigned there, and the night was so dark that I could see nothing. However, I made out dimly some one near me. I asked him what had happened; he replied, 'They have just carried the officer of the watch to his cabin; he has fainted, as has also the pilot. The lightning struck our vessel, and our mainmast is split.' I could in fact distinguish the yard of the topsail, which had fallen upon the cross-trees of the main-top. Above it there was neither mast nor rigging, and the whole of the crew had retired into the chart-room. They made a round of the decks, and found that the lightning had descended the whole length of the mast. A woman who had just been confined had seen a globe of fire at the foot of her berth; nevertheless, they found no trace of fire. Everybody awaited with impatience the end of the night.

"At daybreak I went up on deck again. In the sky were some clouds, white and copper-coloured. The wind blew from the west, where the horizon appeared of a ruddy silver, as though the sun were going to rise there; the east was entirely black. The sea rose in huge waves, resembling jagged mountain ranges, formed of tier upon tier of hills. On their summit were great jets of spray tinted with the colours of the rainbow. They rose to such a height that from the quarter-deck they seemed to us higher than the topmast. The wind made so much noise in the rigging it was impossible for us to hear one another. We were scudding before the wind under the foresail. A stump of the topmast hung from the end of the mainmast, which was split in eight places down to the level of the deck. Five of the iron bands with which it was bound had been melted away...."

Here are now some extracts from one of Pierre Loti's storms. We shall thus be able to estimate the progress which descriptive literature has made in the last two centuries.

"The waves, still small, began to chase one another and melt together; they were at first marbled with white foam, which on their crests broke into spray. Then with a kind of hiss there rose a smoke: you would have said the water was boiling or burning, and the strident clamour of it all increased from moment to moment.... The great bank of clouds which had gathered on the western horizon in the shape of an island, was beginning to break up from the top and the fragments were scudding over the sky. It seemed to be inexhaustible; the wind drew it out, elongated it, and stretched it, bringing out of it dark curtains, which it spread over the clear yellow sky, now become livid, cold, and dark.

"And all the while it grew stronger and stronger, this mighty breath which made all things to tremble.

"The ship, the Marie, prepares for bad weather, and begins to fly to leeward.

"Overhead it had become quite dark, a dead vault that seemed as if it would crush you—with a few spots of a yet blacker blackness, which were spread over it in formless patches. It seemed almost like a motionless dome, and you had to look closely to see that it was in the full whirl of movement. Great sheets of grey cloud hurrying by and unceasingly replaced by others, rose from the bottom of the horizon, like gloomy curtains unrolling from an endless coil.

"The Marie fled faster and faster before the storm, and the storm fled after her as if from some mysterious terror. Everything—the wind, the sea, the ship, the clouds—was seized with the same panic of flight and speed towards the same point. And all this passion of movement grew greater, under an ever-darkening sky, in the midst of ever-increasing din.

"From everything arose a Titanic clamour, like the prelude of an apocalypse foreboding the horror of a world's catastrophe. Amidst it you could distinguish thousands of voices; those above were shrill or deep, and seemed far off because they were so mighty; that was the wind, the great soul of this confusion, the invisible power that dominated it all. It filled one with fear, but there were other sound nearer, more material, more ominous of destruction, which came from the writhen water, that hissed as it were upon embers."[10]

After the pages which we have just read there is nothing more in the way of progress possible. The only thing to be done would be to return to the great simplicity of Homer, Lucretius, and Virgil, to obtain the same emotions in two or three lines.

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's style is bald beside that of Pierre Loti; it requires an effort to return to it. The arrival at Port Louis of the ship, disabled, and filled with scurvy-smitten people, is, however, striking in its simplicity. "Just imagine this riven mainmast, this ship with her flag of distress, firing guns every minute; a few sailors, looking like spectres, seated on the deck; the open hatches, whence rose a poisonous vapour; the 'tween-decks full of dying people, the deck covered with invalids exposed to the heat of the sun, and who died whilst speaking to one. I shall never forget a young man of eighteen, to whom the evening before I had promised a little lemonade. I sought him on the deck amongst the others; they pointed him out to me lying on a plank; he had died during the night."

The passages in which the thought and the expression are thus wedded are unfortunately rare in the Voyage to the Isle of France. In general, the writer does not yet understand how to make the best use of his sketches and notes; and he did not hesitate later on to go over his first sketches and develop them. This makes it very convenient for following his progress in the difficult art which he was creating. One can judge of it in his account of a sunset at sea in the tropics, which he re-wrote for the Études de la Nature. Here is the sketch as it appeared in the Voyage to the Isle of France:

"One evening the clouds gathered towards the west in the form of a vast net, resembling in texture white silk. As the sun passed behind it each strand appeared in relief surrounded with a circle of gold. The gold gradually dissolved into flame-colour and crimson tints, and low on the horizon appeared pale tones of purple, green, and azure.

"Often in the sky there are formed landscapes of singular variety, where you can find the most fantastic shapes, promontories, steep declivities, towers, and hamlets, over which the light throws in succession all sorts of prismatic colours."

This is but a summary account of the scene, a sort of table of contents of the state of the sky on a certain evening. The second description is almost too excessive, and contains too much imagery and too many colours.

"Sometimes the winds roll up the clouds as though they were strands of silk; then they drive them to the west, crossing them over one another like the withies of a basket. They throw to one side of this network the clouds which they have not made use of, and which are not few in number. They roll them up into immense white masses like snow, and pile them up one upon another, like the Cordilleras of Peru, giving to them the forms of mountains, caverns, and rocks. Then towards the evening they calm down a bit, as if they feared to disarrange their work. When the sun goes down behind this magnificent tracery, one sees through all the interstices a multitude of luminous rays, which, lighting up two sides of each mesh, seem to illuminate it with a golden aureole, while the other two sides, which are in shadow, are tipped with superb tones of pale red. Four or five rays of light rise from the setting sun right to the zenith, and edge with a golden fringe the vaguely-defined outline of this celestial barrier, throwing their glowing reflections upon the pyramids of the airy mountains beside them, which appear gold and vermilion. It is then that you see in the midst of their numerous ridges a multitude of valleys which extend into space, and are marked at their entrance by some shade of flesh-colour or pink. The celestial valleys present in their diverse contours inimitable tones of white, which melt away into space as far as the eye can reach, or shadows which lengthen out towards the other clouds without losing themselves in them. You see here and there, emerging from the cavernous sides of these cloud mountains, streams of light which are thrown in bars of gold and silver upon rocks of coral. Here are gloomy rocks pierced through so that you can see the pure blue of heaven through their apertures; there appear long stretches of golden sands, which extend into the wondrous depths of the crimson, scarlet, and emerald-green sky. By degrees the luminous clouds become faint-coloured, and the faint-coloured fade into shadow. Their forms are as varied as their tints, and in turn they appear as islands, hamlets, hills planted with palms, great bridges across rivers, countries of gold, of amethysts, of rubies, or rather there is nothing of all this but just colours and heavenly forms, which no brush can paint, and no tongue express."

The landscapes of the Voyage to the Isle of France are for the most part very sad. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre found the Isle of France ugly and gloomy, perhaps because he had had nothing but trouble there. Throughout his narrative he tries to convey the impression of a barren, cheerless country, in some places covered with scorched grass, which makes it look "black as a coal-pit," in others paved with stones of an iron-grey colour, which form an unpleasant surface to a rugged country. Plants, which he generally loves so much, do not appeal to him there. Many are thorny, others mal-odorous, and the flowers are not pretty. He does not like the trees, they have not the superb bearing of French oaks and chestnuts, and their stiff leaves of dark green give an effect of sadness to the verdure. Here and there, however, one comes across delightful spots where the great woods are enlivened by babbling brooks, but these solitudes, the refuge for runaway slaves, are the theatre of hideous man-hunts. You see this unhappy quarry killed or wounded with gun-shots, and hear the crack of the whip in the air like pistol-shots, and cries which rend one's heart, "Spare me, master, have pity!" To the heart thus oppressed the beauties of the landscape disappear, and one only sees in it "an abominable country." Abominable country, abominable abode, abominable inhabitants, for the most part—that is, the Isle of France of the Voyage—little in all conscience to impress our minds with the idea of a beneficent Providence, careful of our needs. The author saw this, for he abandoned this part of his programme and kept to picturesque effects, producing in the end a meagre book, only a rough sketch of what he had in his head.

The volume appeared in the first months of the year 1773, and in the article of the Correspondence littéraire, by Grunin, in the end of February. The letter which accompanied the copy destined for Hennin is dated March 17: "Here at last, sir and dear friend, is some of the fruit of my garden.... Send me your opinion of my Voyage." Saint-Pierre added in another letter of the 1st of June: "My book has had a great literary success; but that is almost the only profit which I have obtained from it."

Did he really have a great success? It is doubtful as regards the masculine public. Hennin kept an obstinate silence on the subject in his letters, to the great disgust of the author, who had the bad taste to persist, and who wrote to him two years later: "Why do you not talk to me of my Voyage?" Duval, his friend at St. Petersburg, insinuated among his compliments a few words on the passages which suggested "an imitation of Rousseau, of Voltaire, or of Montesquieu." Grunin did not understand it at all. Here is the essential part of his notice: "M. de Saint-Pierre is not wanting in wit, still less in feeling; this last quality appears to be his especial and distinctive characteristic. The greater part of the work consists of observations made at sea, and details of natural history. That struck me as very superficial." Nothing about the style, nor the descriptive scenes, of which the number ought, one would think, to have arrested his observation. Grunin took the Voyage for a scientific work and found it bad; its originality entirely escaped him. It was the same thing with Leharpe, who does not even mention Bernardin de Saint-Pierre in his Cours de Litterature, that is to say that he took little notice of secondary works. Then Sainte-Beuve, who collected his information with so much care, has contradicted himself about the effect produced by the Voyage to the Isle of France. One reads in his first article upon Bernardin de Saint-Pierre: "This narrative had a well-deserved success,"[11] and in his second article, written thirteen years later: "The work received very little notice."[12]

It is curious to compare the indifference of the men towards Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's attempt, with the enthusiasm of the women for the young unknown author who had spoken to them of the colour of the clouds and the melancholy of the great forests. Women arrive at a conclusion much more quickly than men when it is a question of feeling. The women who read the Voyage to the Isle of France understood at once that there was something in it beyond mere observations made at sea and natural history details, more even than sentimental tirades upon the negroes. They divined that they were being introduced to new joys, and they hastened to seek them under the guidance of the sympathetic master who interpreted Nature to them, her beauties, her gentleness, and her passion. The interest which they took in this first work, not very attractive as a whole, was a sort of miraculous instinct on their part.

The Voyage to the Isle of France had hardly appeared before Bernardin de Saint-Pierre set to work again, in spite of all his protestations against ever becoming an author. His diffidence had disappeared. He felt himself to be full of courage and spirit, and it was not to his success that he owed this, but simply to a visit which he chanced to pay, and which was in its consequences the great event of his career. "In the month of May, 1772, a friend having proposed to take me to see J. J. Rousseau, he conducted me to a house in the rue Plâtrière, nearly opposite to the Post Office. We ascended to the fourth story and knocked at the door, which was opened by Mme. Rousseau, who said to us, 'Enter, gentlemen, you will find "my husband" in.' We passed through a tiny ante-room, in which were neatly arranged all the household chattels, to a room where J. J. Rousseau was sitting, in a frock-coat, with a white cap on his head, occupied in copying music. He rose with a smile, offered us seats, and returned to his work, giving his attention all the while to the conversation."[13]

Rousseau was sixty in 1772; his infirmities, his morbid ideas on the subject of persecution, and his disputes with Hume, had put the finishing touch to his reputation as a dangerous lunatic. His visitor was struck with the sad expression underlying his "smiling air." But he was irresistible when he was not roused. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre joyfully yielded to this all-powerful fascination. He felt that he had found the master in literature who had been wanting to him, he who was to give him the right impulse and direction, and that by oral teaching, so much more fruitful than written instruction.

"Near him," he continues, "was a spinet, on which from time to time he tried over some airs. Two little beds, covered with coarse print, striped blue and white like the hangings of his room, a chest of drawers, a table, and a few chairs completed his furniture. On the walls hung a map of the forest and park of Montmorency, where he had lived, and a print of his old benefactor the king of England. His wife was seated sewing; a canary sang in its cage suspended from the ceiling; some sparrows came to pick up bread-crumbs from the window-sills on the side of the street, and on those of the ante-room one saw boxes and pots full of plants such as Nature chose to sow there. The whole effect of this little household was one of cleanliness, peace, and simplicity, which gave one pleasure."

It suggests one of those interiors of Chardin, where the neat little mistress of the house in white cap and apron is busy about the children's dinner. It is the most charming picture we possess of Rousseau at home.

The conversation turned upon travels, the news of the day, and the works of the master of the house. Rousseau was most gracious all the time, and reconducted his visitors to the head of the stairs; but who could tell with so capricious a being whether this first visit would lead to anything? It did, in fact, to Bernardin's intense satisfaction. "Some days after that he came to return my visit. He had on a round wig, well powdered and curled, a nankeen suit, and carried his hat under his arm. In his hand he held a small cane. His whole appearance was modest but very neat, as was that of Socrates, we are told."

This second interview also passed off most agreeably, in looking at tropical plants and seeds, but it was followed by the first tiff. Deceived by the good-natured air of his new friend, Saint-Pierre included him in a distribution he was making of coffee, which he had received from the Colonies. Rousseau wrote to him: "Sir, we have only met once, and you already begin to make me presents; that is being a little too hasty it seems to me. As I am not in a position to make presents myself, it is my custom, in order to avoid the annoyance of unequal friendships, not to receive the persons who make me presents; you can do as you like about leaving this coffee with me, or sending to fetch it; but in the first case please accept my thanks, and there will be an end of our acquaintanceship."

They made it up on condition that Saint-Pierre received "a root of ginseng[14] and a work on Ichthyology," in exchange for his coffee. Rousseau, appeased, invited him to dinner for the next day. After the repast he read his MSS. to him. They talked, the hours flew by, and there resulted from these difficult beginnings an intimacy, stormy, as it was bound to be with Jean Jacques, but wonderfully fruitful for the disciple, who drank in deep draughts of the nectar of poetry, if not of wisdom, which fell from the master's lips. All this took place during their long walks together in the environs of Paris. They would start on foot, early in the morning, each choosing in turn the direction of their walk. Rousseau loved the banks of the Seine and the heights above them, as deserted then as they are peopled to-day. They would go through the bois de Boulogne, botanizing as they went along, and they sometimes saw in "these solitudes" young girls occupied in making their toilet in the open air. A ferry boat would land the two friends at the foot of Mount Valérien, and they would climb up to visit the hermit at the top, who would give them food; or perhaps Rousseau would lead his companion towards the height of Sèvres, promising him "beautiful pine-woods and purple moors." The "deserted commons" of Saint Cloud had also their attractions; nevertheless all that side of Paris rather erred in the way of extreme wildness. Such a powerful effect did Nature have upon these her first lovers, intoxicated with their discoveries, and whose sensations had not been discounted by descriptions taken from books.

When Bernardin de Saint-Pierre was the guide they chose by preference the direction of Prés-Saint-Gervais and Romainville. The familiar and peaceful nooks and corners around these attracted him more than the extreme wildness of Sèvres and Ville-d'Avray. "You have shown me the places which please you," he said; "I am now going to show you one which is to my taste." They passed by the park of Saint-Fargean, absorbed to-day into Belleville, and, by almost imperceptible degrees, gained the gentle heights of those charming solitudes—for they were also solitudes, but less severe than those chosen by Rousseau; green grass there took the place of the brambles of Saint Cloud, and cherry-trees and gooseberry-bushes the dark pines of Sèvres. One had not to seek hospitality from hermits; there were inns, where Rousseau liked himself to make an omelet of bacon, while Saint-Pierre made the coffee, a luxury brought in a box from Paris. They would return by another road, gathering plants and digging up roots as they went; and nothing can express the charm with which the cantankerous and suspicious Jean Jacques knew how to surround these excursions. He showed himself a simple-minded, good fellow, an easy-going and cheery comrade, interesting himself in everything, talking of everything, and lavishing his ideas with the magnificent prodigality of the rich.

Whether Bernardin de Saint-Pierre turned the conversation upon philosophy or questions of economy, upon the Greeks and Romans, or hygiene, upon his father the watchmaker, or upon Voltaire, the stream flowed on in great waves, pouring out pell-mell anecdotes, aphorisms, theories, descriptions of scenery, and literary opinions. One might have said that he was taking his revenge for those conversations in society in which he was known to fall short. "My wit is always half an hour after that of others," he said of himself. It was not so in a tête-a-tête, and every one of his words entered like the stroke of a plummet into his young companion's mind, whose ideas had need of a little help before they could burst forth. The effect of all this was not long in showing itself. Saint-Pierre has fixed the dates in a letter to Hennin of July 2, 1778, six years after his intimacy with Rousseau. "At last I hope to find water in my wells; for six years I have jotted down a great many ideas, which require putting in order. Amongst much sand there are, I hope, some grains of gold."

The enchantment of the walks lasted until their return to Paris. Then Rousseau's brow would grow dark at the sight of the first houses of the suburb. His mania resumed possession of him. He frowned, hastened his steps, became taciturn and morose. One day, when his friend tried to distract him, he stopped short, to say to him all at once, in the middle of the street: "I would rather be exposed to the arrows of the Parthians than to the gaze of men." This mood would sometimes be prolonged as long as they were in the town, and no one was then safe from the strokes of his sarcasm.

"One day, when I went to return a book ... he received me without saying a word, and with an austere and gloomy air. I spoke to him; he only replied in monosyllables, continuing all the time to copy music; he struck out or erased his work every minute. To distract myself, I opened a book which was on the table. 'You like reading, sir?' he said, in a discontented tone. I got up to go; he rose at the same time, and reconducted me to the head of the stairs, saying, when I begged him not to trouble himself: 'One must be ceremonious with persons with whom one is not on a familiar footing.'" Saint-Pierre, hurt, swore that he would never return; but they met, arranged another walk, and Rousseau once more became amiable at sight of the first bushes. "At last," he said, "here we are beyond the carriages, pavements, and men."[15]

Their intimacy lasted until after Rousseau's departure for Ermenonville in 1778, a short time before his death. His friend mourned his loss bitterly, and always spoke of him with tenderness and admiration. He did not forget how much he owed to him. He acknowledged, at least in part—which is, after all, fine and praiseworthy—that if he had shown a spark of the sacred fire, it was Rousseau who had lighted it in their intercourse. He has never sought to hide the fact that his works are strewn with ideas which occurred to them during their walks, and which they had discussed as they sauntered together under the shadow of some tree, or in the green woodland paths. The results of these walks with Jean Jacques will be found in the Études de la Nature. In comparing this work with the Voyage to the Isle of France, one can see exactly what Bernardin owed to his illustrious friend. The Voyage proves to us that he knew what he wished to do long before he met the author of the Reveries, but that, at the same time, he would never have reached the goal without the impulse given to him by a genius more robust than his own.

It hung on quite a small chance that his career was not blighted at the very moment when his fancy was preparing to take flight. The success which the Voyage to the Isle of France had with the fair sex nearly proved fatal to its author. Their approval had to be paid for, as is always the case. M. de Saint-Pierre was invited into the fashionable world, and charming women flung themselves at his head, with their habitual indiscretion, and caused him acute suffering. He had scruples, and he was vain. The world laughed at his scruples, his vanity could not console him for its scoffs, and the women did not thank him for his respect; so that his soul was filled with bitterness and disgust. He could not get over the depravity of society, and was seized with a morbid irritation against it. Some months after he had mixed in it, his imagination made it appear to him to be wholly and solely occupied in making fun of him, of his goodness, of his gentleness, of his pride, of all the virtues that he liked to attribute to himself, and which he chose, as is the habit of all of us, amongst those he least possessed. Soon he could not hear any one laugh without thinking they were laughing at him, and every gesture made him suspicious. He said later: "I could not even walk along a path in a public garden where a few people were assembled without thinking, if they looked at me, that they were disparaging me, even if they were quite unknown to me." Thirty years later he was still persuaded that Mlle. de Lespinasse had intended to insult him one day when she offered him a sweetmeat, at the same time praising him for his kindness on a recent occasion.

He fought duels in order to put a stop to the whispered raillery which he thought he heard around him. Two fortunate affairs were powerless to soothe his nerves, and strange disorders began to make him fear for his reason. He consulted physicians, who recommended diverse remedies; but he required money for them, and his bookseller had not paid him. Meanwhile the evil grew from bad to worse, and at last came the crisis. "Flashes of light, resembling lightning, disturbed my sight; every object appeared to me to be double, and as though in motion.... My heart was not less troubled than my head. On the finest summer day I could not cross the Seine in a boat without feeling intolerable qualms.... If in a public garden I but passed near the basin of a fountain full of water, I felt a sensation of spasm and horror. There were times when I believed that I must have been bitten by a mad dog without knowing it."

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre was mad, not incurably so, or enough to be shut up; but, for all that, mad. He knows it, acknowledges it, and adds to his heartrending confession a note, which explains how he was able to hide his condition from the world around him. "God granted me this signal favour, that however much my reason was disturbed, I never lost the consciousness of my condition myself, or forgot myself before others. Directly I felt the approach of the paroxysms of my malady, I would retire into solitude." Here follows a slight metaphysical discussion upon "this extraordinary reason," which warned him "that his ordinary reason was disturbed."

Just about the same time his brother Dutailly began the series of extravagances which obliged them to shut him up.

Meantime, the world from which Bernardin de Saint-Pierre had succeeded in hiding himself, was without indulgence for him, and pronounced him to be wicked, while he was in reality only unhappy. We have now arrived at the years of pain, of physical and moral distress, of equivocal ills, absurd suspicions, quarrels, ill-will, and, alas! of begging. Some of his friends became estranged by his incomprehensible humour, others gave him up, and of this number were "the philosophers," d'Alembert, Condorcet, all the intimates of Mlle. de Lespinasse. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre has, in an Apologie addressed to Mme. Necker to beg her protection, naïvely explained that he quarrelled with "the philosophers" because they failed to induce Turgot to help him. "If they had been my friends," he adds, with indignation, "could they have acted so? Pensions, easy posts, rings for their fingers, are distributed to their clients, while to me they only come to advise me to leave the country, although I showed them that I had the greatest repugnance to such a course."[16] (January 26, 1780.)

He retired from the world, living an unsociable life in a miserable lodging-house, not willingly seeing any one but Rousseau, so well able to understand a misanthrope, and a few faithful friends who put up with all his moods, at the head of whom was Hennin, whose patience was admirable. The position which the latter held in the Foreign Office led to his being charged with the presentation of the petitions that his gloomy and needy friend addressed to the ministers; and the task was not an easy or pleasant one, as their correspondence testifies. Saint-Pierre begged shamelessly. "I have neither linen nor clothes; my excursions on foot have worn them out. If you wish to see me again, induce them to give me the means of appearing. You know that your department decidedly owes me something.... Do remember to think of me in the distribution of the king's favours; I need them greatly.... I am reduced to borrowing, and I have nothing to expect till February of next year." And so on from month to month, if not from week to week. If there was delay in sending the money, M. Hennin would receive a bitter letter, in which M. de Saint-Pierre would excuse himself for not having visited him on account of the bad weather, adding: "If I had received the favour which you led me to hope for, I should have taken a carriage." If the money was forthcoming, it was still worse for Hennin, because of the ceremonies with which it had to be conveyed to its recipient. There is amongst their correspondence a series of letters which are quite comic, about a sum of £300 that Saint-Pierre had begged hard for, and which he wished M. de Vergennes personally to press him to accept. He demands a "letter of satisfaction and kindness" from the minister, written with his own hand, without which he refuses the £300. Silence on the part of Hennin, who is evidently overcome by this extraordinary pretentiousness; uneasiness on the part of Bernardin, who trembles lest he should be taken at his word. The £300 are sent to him; he pockets them, spends them, and continues to claim his letter. A year later he is still claiming it, without having ceased to beg in the meantime.

It is true that this took place at a time when the bounties of the king conferred honour upon the recipient, and when the nobility of France set the example of holding out the hat to catch the royal manna. It is true that it took place very near the time when the man of letters lived upon his servile dedications, upon inferior employments among the rich and great, and considered himself only too happy, in the absence of copyright, to repay in flatteries the rent of a room at the Louvre or the Condé mansion. It is true that one must not ask for a strict account from a brain disturbed by hallucinations, and that nothing could relieve the mind of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre of the idea that the French Government owed him compensation for his journey to Poland, where he assured them he had run the risk of being taken by the Russians and sent to Siberia. It was the same with the memorials, with which for fifteen years he harassed people in office, and the others which he promised to send them. The same with the situations which he had lost through his own fault, and those which had been refused to him. The same with his literary works, to which he gave up his time, and which had for their aim the happiness of mankind; and the same with the services which he had rendered to his country, a long list of which appears in the Apologie. "I remember that in the park at Versailles I pacified an infuriated Breton peasant woman, who intended, she informed me, to go and get up a riot under the very windows of the king. This was during the bread riots. Another time I had a discussion with an atheistical reaper." How was it possible to refuse a pension to a man who had done that!

In common justice they owed him also compensation for the great and glorious things they had prevented him from accomplishing. He had ripened his plan of an ideal colony, and sent project after project to Versailles. Sometimes he offered himself to civilise Corsica, sometimes to conquer Jersey, or North America, or to found a small state in France itself, within the king's dominions. Nobody had deigned to take any notice of his plans, unless perhaps "some intriguing, avaricious protegé" should have stolen his ideas and was preparing to carry them out in his stead; such things did happen sometimes. He laid the blame of the culpable negligence of the Government upon the head clerk of the Foreign Office, and he did not spare his reproaches. The excellent Hennin groaned, grieved over it, but did not get angry. He himself counted upon recompense also, and he did not count in vain. As soon as this mind diseased recovered itself a little, there were most delightful outpourings to the good and true friend who was never harsh or unfeeling. Then there are periods in their correspondence like oases of peace and poetry. In the beginning of 1781 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, at Hennin's suggestion, quitted his wretched furnished room, and took a lodging in the rue Neuve-Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, which he called his donjon, and where cheerfulness streamed in at every window. The staircase was in the courtyard to the right, and on ascending to the fourth story under the roof, one found four small bright rooms, from which one looked out upon a little bit of country. It was nothing but gardens, orchards, convents, peaceful little cottages, the wide sky overhead, and the low horizon. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre felt that he was saved. He wrote a letter to Hennin which is a song of joy. He says:—

"I shall come to see you with the first violet; I shall have to walk five miles, but shall do it joyfully, and I intend to give you such a description of my abode as will make you long to come and see me and take a meal with me. Horace invited Mecænas to come to his cottage at Tivoli, to eat a quarter of lamb and drink Falernian wine. As my purse is getting very low, I shall only offer you strawberries and mugs of milk, but you will have the pleasure of hearing the nightingales sing in the groves of the convent of the English nuns, and of seeing the young novices play in their garden." (February 7, 1781.)

Another year April perfumes the air, and Hennin has promised to come and dine in the donjon. His friend describes the menu to him: "Simple viands, amongst which will be found a big pie that Mme. Mesnard is going to give me; a pure wine, good of its kind; excellent coffee, and punch, which I make well, let me say without vanity." It is a question of fixing a day. "Nature must undertake the chief cost of this little feast, therefore I expect she will have carpeted the paths with verdure and decorated the groves of trees in my landscape with leaves and flowers. If you were an observer of nature, I should say to you start the very first day that you see the chestnut tree set out its chandeliers; but you are one of those who only have eyes for the evolution of human forces. Let me know the day you choose," &c.

The dinner was as charming as the invitation. It was talked of at Versailles, and some fair dames lamented aloud that they had not been invited.

To most of them the donjon would have appeared a hateful abode: one froze in it in winter and was roasted in summer, and every gust of wind threatened to blow it away. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, obstinate dreamer that he was, preserved all his life the most tender and faithful remembrance of his aërial lodging: "It was there," he wrote in his mature age, "in the midst of a profound solitude, and under a bewitching horizon, that I experienced the sweetest joys of my life. I should perhaps still be there if for a whim they had not forced me to turn out in order to pull it down. It was there that I put the finishing touches to my Études de la Nature, and from there I published it."[17] And it is there that one must look upon him in order to do him justice after our earlier sad pictures of him.

Before he had become a morose beggar, suffering with weak nerves, he was, we must remember, possessed with the idea that to a man carrying in his head a book which he believes to be good and useful, all means are fair for accomplishing his destiny of creative artist and intellectual guide. He recognises no choice of means, he is the slave, and at need the victim of a superior power, which commands him to sacrifice his repose and his pride on condition that he acquits himself of his debt towards mankind by giving to it a work which will bring a little happiness to our poor world. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre was quite certain that he possessed the magic word which lifts up the heart, and rather than throw it to the four winds of heaven, he would have begged alms on the highway. Was he right? was he wrong? We owe it to his great faith to leave our verdict undecided.

Think of him in his garret, and you will understand that he begged not for himself, but for his book, which is a very different matter. He is avaricious because he hopes still to write another chapter before going on the tramp again. He has only one coat for the whole year, winter and summer. He does his own housekeeping, sweeps, cleans, cooks. He allows himself so little firing that in winter the water remains frozen for eight days in his rooms, and his pitchers burst. He goes on foot to Versailles to see Hennin, and returns in the same way at night; all the better if it is moonlight, all the worse if it rains. His health suffers, but his head recovers, and he is happy; he has a "whole trunk" full of rough draughts, which he copies, corrects, and arranges. "You cannot imagine," he writes to Hennin, "the tenderness of an author for his production; that of a mother for her son is not to be compared to it. I am always adding to or cutting out something of mine. A bear does not lick her cub with more care than I; I fear in the end I shall rub away the muzzle of mine with my licking. I do not wish to touch it any more.... There have been moments when I have caught a glimpse of heaven." (December 18, 1783.)

When the moment arrives to have his work printed, he redoubles his economy. He is sordid and at the same time a greater borrower, more in debt than ever; for after all it is in order to commit some extravagance for his "child"—to have fine paper, to add a print here, a pretty frontispiece there. The extravagance accomplished, he writes to Hennin, one of his principal lenders, to demonstrate to him that this is an excellent speculation:—

"It is not a superfluous expense, even if the print in 12^o itself comes to fourteen or fifteen pounds, because it is possible that many people will buy my work for the print alone, as has happened to others. Moreover, I shall raise the price of my edition with it, so as to reap more than I sowed. So...." (June 29, 1784.)

Thus it was as clear as noonday that this lovely engraving would make his fortune, a very important matter to his creditors. We do not possess Hennin's reply, but there is no doubt, after what we know of his kindness, that he made pretence of being convinced.