The expedition set sail under the most promising auspices, but once on the open sea, the Commander wished to bring Bernardin de Saint-Pierre to a more reasonable view of the situation, and explained to him that he had never had any other design than to sell his subjects. I leave to the imagination the effects of this thunderclap. They were taking him to join them in the slave trade of the people of Madagascar! The horror of such a thought increasing the shame of having been duped, voyage, companions, projects for the future, and the very name of Madagascar, all became odious to him on the spot. His ship touched at the Isle of France. He hastened to disembark, took a situation as engineer, and left his Commander to go on alone to Madagascar, where, it may be remarked by the way, the expedition perished of fever. For himself, discouraged and justly embittered, he lived in a lonely little cottage from which he could see nothing but the sea, arid plains, and forests. Seated in front of his one window, he spent long hours in letting his gaze wander aimlessly. Or, perhaps, a melancholy pedestrian, he wandered about on the shore, in the mountains, in the depths of those tropical forests which we picture to ourselves as so beautiful, and which he found so sad, because nothing there recalled to him the pleasant scenes of his own country, and because he saw the Isle of France under such gloomy auspices.
"There is not a flower," he wrote, "in the meadows, which, moreover, are strewn with stones, and full of an herb as tough as hemp; no flowering plant with a pleasant scent. Among all the shrubs not one worth our hawthorn. The wild vines have none of the charms of honeysuckle or ground ivy. There are no violets in the woods, and as to the trees, they are great trunks, grey and bare, with a small tuft of leaves of a dull green. These wild regions have never rejoiced in the songs of birds or the loves of any peaceable animal. Sometimes one's ear is offended by the shrieks of the parroquet, or the strident cries of the mischievous monkey."[6]
His melancholy lasted throughout his stay and was good for him: "One enjoys agreeable things," he said afterwards, "and the sad ones make one reflect." That was the lesson which the Isle of France had given to him. He had been there much thrown back upon himself, and he had gained at last a glimpse of the right road. Instead of continuing to cram his notes of travel with technical details, good at most to adorn his memorials to the ministers, he had set himself to note down what he observed from his window, or during his walks. He made a note of the lines and forms of the landscape, of its general appearance, the formation of the ground, the structure of the rocks, the outlines of the trees and plants. He observed their colours, their most subtle shades, their variations according to the weather or time of day, their smallest details, such as the red fissure on a grey stone, or the white underside of a green leaf. He notes the sounds of his solitude, the particular sound of the wind on a certain day in a certain place, the murmur belonging to each kind of tree, the rhythm of a flight of birds, the imperceptible rustling of a leaf moved by an insect. He noted the movements of inanimate nature, the waving of the grass, the parts of a circle described by the force of the wind in the tree tops, the swaying of a leaf upon which a bird had perched itself, the flowing of the streams, the tossing of the sea, the pace of the clouds.[7]
Sometimes he drew, and his sketches were only another form of notes. During the crossing, while full of acute sorrow, he had drawn numberless clouds. He studied their forms, their colour, their foreground and background, their combinations, by themselves or with the sea, the play of light upon them, with the attention and conscientiousness of a painter of to-day, exacting in the matter of truth.
This rage for taking notes seems a simple thing to us now; it is the method of to-day, but it was unique and unheard of in 1769. No one, in France at least, had bethought himself of these descriptions, for which one must have materials. Moreover, no one was then in a position to note the details of a landscape, for the simple reason that no one was capable of seeing them, not even Rousseau. Not that he had not the same keen perception for nature that Bernardin de Saint-Pierre had, but it struck him in a somewhat different way, as we shall see later. Besides, the Confessions and the Reveries did not appear till after his death, and could not have had any influence whatever on the birth at the Isle of France in 1769 of picturesque literature.
It was a birth as yet obscure and seemingly uncertain. This young engineer, who sketched sunsets instead of making plans, did not know very well what he would do with his "observations." He felt that they would not be wasted, and that they were not like other stories of travel; but the definite initiation into his own sphere was still wanting.
It concerns us little what Bernardin de Saint-Pierre did at the Isle of France, outside his dreamings, or whether he was right or wrong in his quarrels, his disagreements, and his lamentations. It suffices for us that he returned to Paris in the month of June, 1771, his portfolio full of scraps of paper, his trunks full of shells, plants, insects and birds, and what was of more value, his head full of pictures. He was as poor as when he set out, and still more unsociable, but he was ripe for his task. "He had seen, he had felt, he had suffered, he had heaped up emotions and colours, he had made himself different from other men. To the vulgar crowd he had been an adventurer, but he had passed through the school which develops painters, poets, and men of talent. That is what he had gained by his long travels."[8] It is a great advantage when one is oneself an exceptional being, to have had a youth which was not like that of everybody else. An ordinary man would have run a great chance of coming out diminished in energy, and on the wrong road, from those dangerous years of apprenticeship which led the author of Paul and Virginia to be himself. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre came through them without too many mishaps. His travels only made him a little more original, and more misanthropic than he was in the beginning.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Aimé Martin, author of the great biography entitled Memoirs of the Life and Works of J. H. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. [1 vol. 8vo. 1820.]
[2] Harmonies of Nature, book v.