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.