What remained for him to do appeared mere child's play after what he had accomplished. His pamphlet upon his projected colony was ready—it was the same from which we have quoted some fragments above—and it was not too ill-conceived. In it the author spoke little of the happiness of peoples, and much of the utility to Russia of securing a route to the Indies. The settlement which he proposed to found on the Sea of Aral lost under his pen its doubtful character as a philosophical and humanitarian enterprise, to take on the innocent aspect of a military colony intended to keep the Tartars in check, and to serve as an emporium for merchandise from India. In fact he thought he ought to support it with a speech, which he composed, his Plutarch in his hand, and in which he celebrated "the happiness of kings who establish republics." But this speech had no unpleasant consequences as we shall see presently.
On the day appointed for the audience he put his pamphlet in his pocket, glanced over his speech, and followed his guide to the palace. They entered a magnificent gallery, full of great nobles glittering with gold and precious stones, who inspired our young enthusiast on the spot with keen repugnance. There they were those vile slaves of monarchy, whose lying tongues knew no other language than that of flattery! What would be their surprise, what their attitude, on hearing a free man speak boldly of freedom to their sovereign? All at once the door was thrown open with a loud noise, the Empress appeared, every one was silent and remained motionless. The grand master of the ceremonies presented M. de Saint-Pierre, who kissed her hand, and forgot his pamphlet, his speech imitated from Plutarch, his republic, all mankind, and only remembered how to reply gallantly to the great lady who deigned to smile upon his youth and his beautiful blue eyes.
And thus was buried for ever the project of a colony by the Sea of Aral. The author took it the next morning to the favourite of the day, Prince Orloff, and explained its advantages to him without being able to inspire him with the least interest. The Prince indeed seemed relieved when they came to tell him that the Empress was asking for him. "He waited upon her at once in his slippers and dressing-gown, and left M. de Saint-Pierre profoundly distressed and in a mood to write a satire against favourites."[3] He returned, intensely discomfited, to his room at the inn, and took up the education of his manservant while awaiting another opportunity of founding his ideal republic. His servant was a poor devil of a moujik, who had been kidnapped from his family and made a soldier, and who would sing, with tears in his eyes, sweet and melancholy folk songs. He would put his master's shoes into a bucket of water to clean them, only taking them out when they were wanted. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, having taught him how to brush a coat, he was ready to throw himself at his feet and adore him as a superior being.
Meanwhile his master remained inconsolable at having by his own fault failed to accomplish the happiness of mankind. Russia had lost its attraction, he now only saw in it matter for disgust and anger, and he was angry with himself for having come so far simply to contemplate "slaves" and "victims." His profession bored him. He had addressed to the Russian government several memorials upon the military position and means of defence of Finland, whither his duties as officer of Engineers had called him, and his labours had met with no better fortune there than in France; nobody paid any attention to it. Anger grew upon him, then bitterness, and he seized upon the first pretext to send in his resignation, and cross the frontier in order to seek elsewhere a "land of liberty" where the antique virtues still lived. A happy inspiration induced him with this idea to follow the road through Poland where the people were at that time the most oppressed and most miserable in Europe. At sight of Warsaw "he felt in his heart all the virtues of a republican hero."
They did not remain with him long; other and more tender interests were soon to replace them. Warsaw is the scene of the romance of his youth, the adventure that his imagination as time went on turned into a devouring passion, which he ended in believing in himself, and which his biographers have related sometimes with virtuous indignation, accusing him of having lived for more than a year at the expense of a woman, sometimes with the respect due to great sufferings and unmerited misfortunes. Unhappily or happily, some letters of his, published for the first time thirty years ago,[4] show him to have been at once less culpable and less worthy of compassion. These letters are addressed to a friend in Russia, M. Duval, a Genevese merchant established at St. Petersburg. In them Saint-Pierre speaks of his love affairs with the indiscretion of youth and the vanity of a bourgeois anxious to announce to the world that he has made a conquest of a princess. It is amusing to compare this sincere report, confirmed by the Correspondence published in his complete works,[5] with the official story no less sincere, which the hero of the adventure liked to circulate in his old age.
He arrived at Warsaw on the 17th of June, 1764, and was at once received into the houses of several of the nobility. Some weeks passed in festivities, which gave him more just views upon the subject of Polish austerity, and the antique virtues of the country, and he very soon wished to leave. On the 28th of July he wrote to his friend Hennin: "You think my position here agreeable, so it appears from afar, but if you only knew how empty is the world in which I wander; if you knew how much these dances and grand repasts stupefy without amusing me!" He then begs M. Hennin to use his interest for him at Versailles, and to obtain for him a mission to Turkey, "the finest country in the world as he has been told."
On the 20th of August there is another letter to M. Hennin, in which he shows that he is more and more impatient to leave Poland: "If nothing keeps me here I shall leave in the beginning of the month of September for ... Vienna, for I am tired of so much idleness, of which the least evil is that I am growing accustomed to an indolent life." This is certainly not the language of a man desperately in love, whose heart would be broken if one tore him away from the spot where his divinity breathed. But if we believe the legend, that was, however, the moment in which Bernardin de Saint-Pierre surpassed the passion of Saint-Preux, and lived the life of The Modern Heloïse, because it was his fate to realise all that Rousseau had been content to write about, as well in his romances as in his plans of social reform. This is briefly what the legend tells us.
Among the persons who had thrown open their doors to him at Warsaw, was a young princess named Marie Miesnik, remarkable for "her love of virtue." We see that this is exactly the starting-point of The Modern Heloïse, a plebeian falls in love with a patrician. "From the first day," says Aimé Martin, "M. de Saint-Pierre felt the double ascendancy of her genius and her beauty, and she became at once the sole thought of his life." On her side the Julia of Poland did not remain insensible. We pass over the emotions which filled and lacerated their souls to the day blessed and fatal, when overtaken by a storm in a lonely forest, they repeated the scene of the groves of Clarens, adding thereto recollections of Dido's grotto. "She gave herself up like Julia, and he was delirious with joy like Saint-Preux," continues Aimé Martin, whose phrase proves how much the resemblance with The Modern Heloïse was part of the tradition. Long intoxication followed these first raptures. More than a year passed in forgetfulness of the whole world, but Princess Marie's family began, like Julia's, to be irritated with the insolence of this plebeian who dared to make love to a Miesnik, and the end of it was an order to depart, given by the lady to her lover, like Rousseau again, and which was obeyed with the same passionate lamentations.
That is what time and a little good-will made of the adventure of Warsaw. Now for history.