Bernardin de St. Pierre

by Arvède Barine

He is discreet; he keeps to himself the declarations of love by which a man knows at once that he is become celebrated. None of them escapes it, let him be writer, statesman, or tenor, and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre received his share like the rest. One of the first came from a young Swiss lady of Lausanne, whose letter is a jewel of artless simplicity. She writes to him that she is young, beautiful, and rich; that she offers him her hand, with her mother's sanction, but that being a protestant, she does not wish to marry a Roman Catholic; she continues, "I wish to have a husband who will love only me, and who will always love me. He must believe in God, and must serve Him in the same way that I do; ... I would not be your wife unless we are to work out our salvation together." He replied evasively: "I think as you do, and to love, Eternity does not seem to me too long. But before all people must know one another, and see one another in the world." His young correspondent found the reply too vague, and sent a friend of hers to M. de Saint-Pierre to ask him whether or not he would become a convert. The ambassadress was pressing: "You have said that the birds sing their hymns, each one in his own language, and that all these hymns are acceptable in the sight of God; therefore you will become protestant and marry my friend." M. de Saint-Pierre contended: "I have never said that a nightingale ought to sing like a blackbird, I shall therefore change neither my religion nor my song." The negotiation ended there.

Another suit was pressed upon him by an abbé. The letter began with reproaches upon the pride of which M. de Saint-Pierre had given proof on several occasions, and continued in these terms: "My niece is a very amiable young lady, as artless as innocence itself, pure as a beautiful spring day, of noble stature, happy countenance ... (we abridge), and above all, of the best disposition." This niece being only seventeen, her husband would receive her "straight from the hand of nature, before society had moulded her to its methods," which is certainly the duty of the author of the Études de la Nature. The lady has not a penny, but that would evidently not deter the author of the Études. "We believe," wrote her uncle, "you, she, and I, in Providence." We have not Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's reply, but he did not marry this time either.

He refused with the same prudence invitations to go and stay with people in the country. "Benevolence," he said wittily, "is the flower of friendship, and its perfume lasts as long as one leaves it on its stem, without plucking it."

He tried to reply to his letters, but had to give up the attempt; they came now from the whole of Europe. Very soon he was compelled to refuse them at the post office, for they did not frank them at that time. He paid upwards of £80 for postage of letters in one year, saw that glory costs too much, and from that time made a selection of his correspondence.

At last, joy of joys! The Queen Marie Antoinette mentioned the Études de la Nature at a dinner at Mme. de Polignac's, and Mme. de Genlis took the princes, her pupils, to visit the author, the lion of the day, in his hermitage.

The reasons of this triumph are easily explained. The influence of Rousseau, which was always growing, had a good deal to do with it. People only asked to be sentimental, to believe in natural laws, to make the social organisation responsible for all their ills. Many of them, too, only asked to rest from the aggressive and dry irreligion in which they had lived for so long. All the tender souls for whom scepticism is never anything but a passing mood, hailed with joy the religious reaction of which the Études de la Nature gave the signal. This was one of the two principal reasons of its enormous success. The other great reason was that people were beginning to read the Confessions and the Reveries, just published at Geneva, and that men's minds were open to poetry, of which they had been for many generations deprived. Poetry was the thing most wanting in France at the end of the eighteenth century, and was most in need of being revived. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre was a poet, and he brought them a new poetry that became popular in a few weeks. As to his false science, it only irritated the scientists. The great public was at that time very ignorant on all scientific subjects, and quite ready to judge by sentiment of the origin of volcanoes and the form of the poles. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's theories found zealous partisans, and seven months had not passed when a candidate at the Sorbonne presented a thesis in which he compared the Études de la Nature to Buffon's Époques de la Nature, which was a great enemy to final causes, as we know, and held the natural man to be a mere brute.

Meantime the object of so much praise remained poor. Imitations of his book appeared on all sides, and took from him the best of his profits. "Hardly have I gathered a few sheaves," he wrote on the 6th of July, 1785, "than the rats enter my granary." Besides that he worked hard to pay his debts, which were many. That is why he begged just as before, pensions from the king and gratuities from the ministers. The habit was formed, as often happens to men who have had a needy youth.

His first savings (he made them in spite of everything, and that is what makes it difficult to excuse him this time) were devoted to buying a cottage and garden in an obscure part of the town, amongst low, miserable surroundings. His street was not paved, and he said gaily about it: "Perhaps if my work continues to bring me so many visitors, the carriage-folk will employ their influence at least to have it cleaned for me." The ragged neighbours did not frighten him. "When I came to live amongst the poor in this part of the town," he replied to remarks, "I took my place amongst the class to which I have belonged for some time. Everything gave way to the happiness of having a corner of land to dig and mess about in." Hardly established in it, the naïve pride of the householder bursts forth in his letters. He had paid for house and garden £200, and one would think, in reading what he writes of it, that he possessed an extensive park. He has "an orchard, some vines," and a large space for flowers. He writes to ask his friends to give him seeds, bulbs, and plants; one would imagine that all the species of both hemispheres would not suffice to fill his garden. As soon as his innocent mania is known, they send him from all sides enough to fill the parterres of Versailles, but he still finds so much room that he sows a patch of vegetables.

With all that he is sad and ill. The reaction has been too great. He writes to Duval: "I have experienced a succession of such vexatious events ... that I may say the depths of my soul have been shaken by them." (January 7, 1787). To someone who congratulates him on his success, he replies: "You only see the flower, the thorn has remained in my nerves." Little by little he calmed down, recovered himself, and gained enough courage to dispute the genuineness of the judgment of the noble tribunal, which had once condemned one part of his work. A fourth volume of the Études de la Nature appeared in 1788. It contained Paul and Virginia.

The introduction to Paul and Virginia clearly explains the intention of the author. "I had great designs in this little work. I tried to depict in it a different soil and vegetation to those of Europe. Our poets have too long allowed their lovers to repose upon the banks of streams, in the meadows, and under the foliage of the beech-trees. I wished to place mine on the seashore, at the foot of the rocks, in the shadow of the cocoa-nut palms, bananas, and flowering lemon-trees. It only needs, at the other side of the world, a Theocritus, or a Virgil, to give us pictures, at least as interesting as those of our country." The ambition to be the Theocritus and the Virgil of the tropics, comes out in all that he had hitherto written, but he wished for something more in his romance, and what follows makes one bless the insubordination of genius, which goes on its way laughing at the best made plans. "I also proposed to myself to bring forward in it several great truths; amongst others this one, that our happiness consists in living according to nature and virtue." A later edition is still more explicit: "This little work is but a relaxation from my Études de la Nature, and the application which I have made of its laws to the happiness of two unhappy families." In other words, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre meant Paul and Virginia to be an instructive and useful romance, a sort of lesson in things intended to prove the justice of the theories developed in his Études de la Nature, and the wisdom of the reforms which he there set forth. His young hero and heroine were to be the living and striking demonstration of the natural goodness of man, of the uselessness of our vain sciences, and of an infinite number of other "great truths" propounded in the course of his work. Happily the poet was often able to make the philosopher forget his programme.