Bernardin de St. Pierre

by Arvède Barine

He becomes ambitious, dreams of gaining "some high position" so as to be more worthy of Virginia. The old man reveals to him that all the roads are closed to those who have neither birth nor fortune. Here follows a digression upon hereditary nobility, the traffic in public offices, the indifference of the great to virtue.

Paul declares that he will attach himself to some "society." "I shall entirely adopt its spirit and its opinions," he says; "I shall make myself liked." The old man reprimands him severely for his weak desire to cling to something. Another digression upon the sacrifice of conscience demanded by societies which "besides interest themselves very little in the discovery of truth."

In despair of his cause Paul decides to be a writer. One can imagine how this is received. The old man draws so black a picture of the persecutions which attend men of letters, that the poor boy is terrified at the thought of the sufferings which each book represents, and exclaims, embracing a tree planted by Virginia, "Ah! she who planted this papaw-tree has given the inhabitants of these forests a more useful and charming present than if she had given them a library." Further digression upon the Gospel and the Greek philosophers.

This is the part that Mme. Necker, at the time of the famous reading in her salon, compared to "a glass of iced water." The criticism was just. The author himself was chilled by the dialogues between Paul and the old man, and cannot regain the passion which carried him so high just before. The shipwreck of the Saint-Géran, and the death of Virginia, which made us all shed floods of tears when we were children, are, it must be allowed, somewhat melodramatic, and from a literary point of view very inferior to the passionate scenes.

Let us forget the didactic portions of the work, and the old preacher who is no other than Bernardin himself. There remains a love-story, one of the most passionate ever written in any language. The more one re-reads it, the less one understands how it could have been taken for an innocent and somewhat insipid pastoral. Sainte-Beuve was surprised at it even forty years ago. "This charming little book," he writes, "which Fontanes placed a little too conventionally, perhaps, between Telémaque and La Mort d'Abel (de Gesner), I should myself place between Daphnis and Chloe, and that immortal fourth book in honour of Dido." Theophile Gautier declared that Paul and Virginia appeared to him to be the most dangerous book in the world for young imaginations. He recalls the fervid emotion which he himself felt in reading it, and which was never equalled later by any other book.[23] These two criticisms have nothing exaggerated in them. The place of Virginia with her beautiful eyes and their black circles, is in the front rank of illustrious lovers, between Chloe, passionate and simple, and the despairing Dido. Nevertheless, such is the empire of the commonplace, that by dint of being enraptured over the grace and sentiment of Bernardin's narrative, one has become accustomed more and more to see in it but a superior Berquin, and to relegate it insensibly to the literature of childhood. More than one reader was scandalized just now that we dared to speak freely of a sacred masterpiece, though he has not read Paul and Virginia since the days when he bowled his hoop, and would have been much surprised if it had been proposed to him.

At the time when the book was most in favour, curiosity was rife to know how far it was a true story. The problem does not interest us to-day, except for what it teaches us about the author's manner of composition. Our realistic novelists would find little to change in it.

The framework is true. The landscapes are copied from nature and perfected by a divination as to what would be the tropical vegetation in a country more fertile than the Isle of France. "Paul and Virginia," Humboldt wrote, "has accompanied me to the countries which inspired Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. I have re-read it during many years with my companion.... When the noonday sky shone with its pure brightness, or in rainy weather, on the shores of the Orinico, while the rolling thunderstorm illuminated the forest; and we were struck, both of us, with the admirable truth with which, in so few pages, the powerful nature of the tropics in all their original features is represented."

The principal characters of Paul and Virginia, those whom he took pains to make alive, are formed of traits borrowed from flesh and blood models, and arranged according as they were needed. We have already said that the author put himself into the book in the character of the old man. In his heroine he has recalled two charming girls whom he had met at one time in Russia and at Berlin, Mlle. de la Tour, and Mlle. Virginie Taubenheim.

Longus furnished the primitive idea of the narrative; the transformation of friendship into love at a fatal moment between two young people brought up together. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre also borrowed from him several points of detail; there are in the first half of Paul and Virginia some passages which very closely follow Daphnis and Chloe.

The description of the manners of the Isle of France was exact when it was written. Reminiscences of several periods suggested the episodes. The pretty scene of the children sheltering themselves from the rain under Virginia's petticoat had been observed by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre in the Faubourg Saint Marceau. The tragedy of the dénoument had been related to him; he did not see it himself, whence it doubtless comes that it looks rather as though it had been arranged. "He only knew how to write about what he had seen," said Aimé Martin; but what he had seen he always illustrated, and one might even give as an epigraph to Paul and Virginia the title which Goethe chose for his memoirs: Poetry and Truth.