Bernardin de St. Pierre

by Arvède Barine

It was in his capacity of Academician that Bernardin de Saint-Pierre was liable to be called upon to address the Emperor. He had belonged to the Academy[25] ever since Napoleon had re-established it (1803). He had belonged to the Institute in the division of moral and political science from its foundation in 1795. In the same year he had charge of the course of ethics at the Normal School, and the Normal School had been suppressed almost directly, which was very lucky, for he did not know how to speak. The elevation of the Bonaparte family sufficed to crown his old age. He was pensioned, decorated, and well treated by the Emperor. The Parisian world petted and flattered him. On one of his journeys to Paris he writes to his second wife: "What is to become of our former dreams of rural solitude? How is it possible, in the midst of so much writing to be answered, and of visits active and passive, to make a fair copy of any pages of my old or new Études? I am like the corn-beetle, living happily in the midst of his family, in the shadow of the harvest-field; should a ray of the rising sun light up the emerald and gold of his sheath, then the children seeing him, take possession of him and shut him up in a little cage, choking him with cake and flowers, believing that they make him happier with their caresses than he was in the bosom of his family." Of course not a word of this great boredom is to be believed in. The little beetle is enchanted, like all literary beetles, to be covered with flowers and shut up in those beautiful cages which are called aristocratic salons. He would be perfectly happy if he had a good temper.

But his temper is worse than ever. He had never had so many quarrels, and there is a concert of recrimination among his colleagues. The Academy is his favourite field of battle, and two of its sittings above all have, thanks to him, remained memorable. At the first one he was in the right; it was in 1798. Religion was still suppressed, and many people would not allow the name of God to be spoken. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre had been entrusted with the report upon some meeting, and into this report he had bravely insinuated a profession of religious faith. Cries of fury arose in the hall, and through the noise one heard Cabanis crying out: "I swear that there is no God! and I demand that his name shall not be mentioned within these walls!" Another wished to do battle with the blasphemer, and prove to him, sword in hand, that God did not exist. They all abused him threatened him, and laughed at him, but he held his own against the storm, and refused to efface the scandalous passage. The Academy refused to read his report in open meeting.

His other great battle was in favour of a less glorious cause. He found means to raise a tempest apropos of the Dictionary, in which he wished to insert some sentiment. "Just imagine," he wrote to Désirée, "that they have put in their Dictionary under the word appertain, 'It appertains to a father to chastise his children.' I told them that it was strange that among a hundred duties which bind a father to his children, they should have chosen the one which would make him odious to them. Thereupon Morellet the harsh, Suard the pale, Parny the amorous, Naigeon the atheist, and others all quoted the Scripture, and all talking at once, assailed me with passages from it, and united themselves against me as they always do. Then, becoming warm in my turn, I told them their quotations were those of pedants and collegians, and that if I were alone in my opinion, I should hold it against them all. They put it to the vote, all raising their hands to heaven, and as they congratulated themselves on having a very large majority, I told them that I challenged their statement because they were all celibates. These are the kind of scenes to which I expose myself when I wish to uphold some natural truth; but it suits me from time to time to defend the laws of nature against people who only know those of fortune and credit." (Letter of September 23, 1806.)

It was hard on him! He had persuaded himself that he was persecuted by the Institute. In his mind the chief occupation of the Institute was to invent some bad turn against M. de Saint-Pierre. In 1803 Maret asked him for his vote. Bernardin replies: "Of what use can the vote of a solitary man be to you, one who has long been persecuted by the body to which you aspire? It can only do you harm. The atheists who govern the Institute, and against whom I have never ceased to contend, have not only deprived me of all influence, be it in preventing me from reading from the tribune at our public meetings the papers which my class have prepared for that purpose; be it in hindering me from obtaining the smallest post to help me to bring up my family, but they have even taken pleasure in publishing abroad that the First Consul said on one occasion: 'I shall never give any employment to a writer who disseminates error.' Thus they have even deprived me of hope.

"That is not all, they have lately been trying to take from me my actual means of subsistence." Here follows a long list of grievances. He has only received £24 indemnity on an occasion when other members of the Academy have had £48; one of his pensions has been reduced £2 per month; his works have been mutilated by the Censor; he hardly dares to present to the public his theory of the tides for fear of sharing the fate of Galileo; he expects to be exiled, compelled to find at a distance a spot "wherein to place the cradles of his three children and his own grave." The admiration of the world would be powerless to protect him against the stubborn animosity of his colleagues in the Institute. "I resemble those saints who attract from afar the homage and the prayers of men, but who near at hand are bitten by insects." This is all nonsense; he had discussed persecutions too much with J. J. Rousseau.

It is not surprising that he was detested by most of his colleagues. Andrieux remembers M. de Saint-Pierre as "a hard, ill-natured man." It is just to add that those who liked him—Ducis, for instance—liked him very much, and that he knew how to take pains to keep his friends. There was no middle course with him: he was hateful or delightful.

He continued to write to the end of his life. "He made a point," says his biographer, "of never letting a single day pass without writing down some observations on nature, if it were only a single line. The result was, in the long run, a multitude of rough notes, hardly decipherable, written upon scraps of paper, which he compared to the Sibylline leaves blown about by the wind, and of which, according to the intention of the author, we have collected the best in his Harmonies."

He also continued to publish without succeeding in shaking his reputation, though it was not his fault if it remained intact, for from the date of the Chaumière Indienne one can count on one's fingers the pages which are not worthless.

The Harmonies de la Nature (three vols., 1796) is only a tame repetition of the Études de la Nature. We must recall under what conditions the Harmonies was written. It required a miracle of faith or fixed resolution to persevere under the Terror, in teaching that there is no evil in the heart of man any more than in the rest of creation. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre accomplished this miracle, but it was useless for him to shut himself up in his study with Telemachus and the Vicar of Wakefield; inspiration did not come, and he had to content himself with sifting the same ideas with nothing new but a degree more of exaggeration.

The arguments in favour of final causes surpass in naïveté, if possible, those of the Études. The foresight of creation has no limit: "Not only has nature given us vegetation suitable to our physical needs, but she has produced some in connection with our moral enjoyment which have become the symbols of it by the duration of their verdure; such as the laurel for victory, the olive for peace, the palm for glory. They have been made to grow on all those sites which by their melancholy and religious aspect seem destined for burial places." These last, which nature has created expressly "to decorate our tombs," and which for this reason are named "funereal trees," are divided into two groups having "opposite characteristics. Those in the first group let their long and slender branches trail to the earth, and one sees them waving about at the pleasure of the wind, looking dishevelled and as though deploring some misfortune. The second group of funereal trees includes those which grow in the form of obelisks or pyramids. If the dishevelled trees seem to carry our regrets towards the earth, these with their upright branches seem to direct our hopes heavenwards."