"Your passion is a fury which I can no longer endure. Return to your senses. Think of your position and your duties. I am just starting, I am going to rejoin my mother in the Palatinate of X. I shall not return until I hear that you are no longer here, and you will receive no letters from me until such time as I can address them to you to France. Marie M—."
She had in fact departed. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre felt outraged, and never saw her again.
He returned to his vagrant excursions through Dresden, Berlin, and Paris, to Havre, where he found only his old nurse. His father was dead, his sister in a convent, his brothers far away. "Ah! sir," said the good woman, upsetting her spinning-wheel in her emotion, "the times are indeed changed. There is no one here to receive you but me!" She invited him to dine in her bare lodging, beside her bed of straw, and served up an omelet and a pitcher of cider. Then she opened her trunk, and took out a chipped glass, which she placed gently beside her guest, saying, "It was your mother's." They wept together, and then they talked over the news of the country, of Brother Paul, who was dead, of those who had left the town, of those who had made their fortunes. They spoke also of Russia, of what they drank there, and of the price they paid for bread. Above all things they talked of the happy times when old Marie used to do up the children's hair in starched curl-papers, admired their nonsense, and with her own money bought the class books lost by Bernardin, so as to save him from a scolding. They wept together again, kissed each other, and the young adventurer set out once more, less discontented with humanity than usual. He was also less satisfied with himself, after the lesson of resignation which he had received from this poor old woman, who lived upon three pence a day, and praised God for taking care of her.
Returned to Paris he again overwhelmed the ministers of the king, Louis XV., with memorials which no one wanted, with complaints and petitions. He continued to invent schemes on all sorts of subjects, and to cover scraps of paper with a thousand scattered ideas. M. Hennin, clearly discerning where his talent lay, persuaded him to write his travels, but the time was not yet come, and the fragments of this date which have been preserved to us contain nothing but information upon political, commercial, and agricultural subjects. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre himself felt that it was too soon. Announcing one day to Hennin that he had conceived a new idea about the movement of the earth, he added:
"You can see by that, that I grapple with everything, and that I leave floating here and there threads, like the spider, until I can weave my web....
"Give me time to lick my cub. Time, which ripens my intellect, will make the fruits thereof more worthy of you." (Letter of the 9th of July, 1767).
He had a sort of instinct that all those Northern scenes which he had passed through were of no use to him. He tried to find employment in the countries of the sun—in the East or West Indies—without knowing himself why there more than anywhere else. It was the exotic that sought him, and it came to him in a most unexpected manner in the autumn of 1767.
It is hardly necessary to say that whoever knew him knew his project of an ideal republic. To whom had he not mentioned it? He had never ceased to believe in it—to be sure that people would come to it, one day or another; but his ill-luck at Moscow had made his belief less confident and less active. He resigned himself to await until Humanity should call upon him to help it. Great then was his joy when one of his patrons announced to him in confidence one fine day that the French government, converted to his ideas, was going to send him to Madagascar, under the command of a certain person from the Isle of France, to found the colony of his dreams, and to attach the island to France by "the power of wisdom" and "the example of happiness." There was certainly some surprise mixed with his delight, but not sufficient to make him ask himself whether his protector wished merely to get rid of him, or for what reason an expedition entrusted solely to himself had for leader a planter from the Isle of France. He only thought of his preparations for his great enterprise.
His first care was to re-read Plato and Plutarch, and to determine the legislation of his colony. He remained faithful to his first idea of a state entirely free, under the control completely absolute, arbitrary, and irresponsible, of M. de Saint-Pierre. Some one, of course, would have to compel the people to be "subject only to virtue." That was the system put in force later by the Jacobins.
He next drew out the plan of his chief town, and employed the small inheritance which came to him from his father, in buying scientific instruments and works upon politics, the navy, and natural history. The expedition was to embark at Lorient. He hastened to rejoin it, and was at first disappointed with its composition, for instead of artisans and agriculturalists, the Commander-in-chief had collected secretaries, valets, cooks, and a small troupe of comedians of both sexes. However, Saint-Pierre took heart at once on learning that the Commander-in-chief had amongst his luggage all the volumes that had yet appeared of the Encyclopædia. He was, therefore, in spite of all, "a true philosopher," and things were pretty evenly balanced. The Encyclopædia took the place of the artisans, and made the actresses pass muster. Take note that Bernardin de Saint-Pierre always reproached his contemporaries, especially the encyclopædists, with being mere visionaries, destitute of practical sense. He flattered himself that he was the practical man in this world of Utopians, but at the same time he looked upon their work as a sort of supernatural book. Such is the power of opinion.