CHAPTER I. Youth—Years of Travel.
In looking over the collection of the portraits of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, we are witnesses of a strange transformation. That of Lafitte, engraved in 1805, during the lifetime of the original, represents a fine old man with a long face, strongly marked features, and locks of white hair falling to his shoulders. His expression has more penetration than sweetness, and certain vertical lines between the brows reveal an unaccommodating temper. This is certainly no ordinary man; but we are not surprised that he had many enemies.
In 1818, four years after the death of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, a less realistic work begins to idealize his features for posterity. An engraving by Frédéric Lignon from a drawing by Girodet represents him as younger, and in an attitude of inspiration. There is an almost heavenly look upon his innocent face, surrounded by an abundant crop of hair artistically curled and falling to his shoulders. Everything in this second portrait is rounded off and toned down, and this is only the beginning of things. The type created by Girodet became more angelic and more devoid of significance at each new reproduction. The eyes get larger, the features are less marked, and we have a hero of Romance, a dreamy, sentimental youth, the apocryphal Bernardin de Saint-Pierre which a vignette of the time of the Restoration shows us, seated at a cottage door, his eyes cast up to heaven, his handkerchief in his hand, while his dog fixes his eyes tenderly upon him, and a negress contemplates him with rapture. Legend has decidedly got the better of history. An insipid and rather ridiculous silhouette has insinuated itself in the place of a countenance full of originality and energy.
At the present day we do a service to the author of Paul and Virginia by treating him without ceremony. The time has come to resuscitate him as he appeared to his contemporaries, with his lined forehead, and his uneasy expression, lest the mawkish Bernardin de Saint-Pierre invented by sentimentalists should make us forget altogether the real man who dared to disagree with the philosophers, and to beard the Academy. One appreciates his work better, knowing that it did not spring from a purely elegiac soul, but from a deliberate and dogged mind which knew what it wanted, and did not play its part of literary pioneer at random.
Jacques Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre was born at Havre in 1737, of a family in which there was little common sense, but great pretensions. The father believed himself to be of noble origin, and was never tired of discoursing to his children of their illustrious ancestors. He had three sons, and one daughter. One of the sons, who took his ancestral glory quite seriously, unable to bear up against the mortifications which awaited him in the world, went out of his mind. The daughter, refusing with disdain all the offers of marriage she received, repented when it was too late, and ended her days in sadness and obscurity. The mother was good and kind, free from vanity, and richly gifted with imagination. Bernardin was fond of relating a conversation which they had had together when he was quite a child about the growing corn. Mme. de Saint-Pierre had explained to him that if every man took his sheaf of corn there would not be enough on the earth for every one, from which they came to the conclusion "that God multiplied the corn when it was in the barns." Here we have already the scheme of the Études de la Nature and we need not ask from whom Bernardin held his method of reasoning.
In spite of the touch of folly which spoilt some members of the family, it was an ideal home for the children's happiness. The life there was simple, and humble friends were by no means despised. A servant of the old-fashioned kind, an old woman called Marie, had her place in it, gave her advice and spoilt the children. A Capucine monk, Brother Paul, would bring sugar-plums and delight the whole household with his stories, which bore no trace of morose religious views. Their studies were a little desultory, their recreations delightfully homely. They gardened, played games in the granary, paddled about on the sea-shore, and fought with the street boys, for all the world as though they had no belief in their noble ancestors. Occasionally they got old Marie to do up their hair in numberless starched curl-papers, which stiffened it and filled the good woman with admiration; they would then put on their best clothes and go to visit Bernardin's godmother, Mme. de Bayard. Those were happy days.
Mme. de Bayard was a countess of ruined fortunes, rather too fond of borrowing, but she had been at the court of Louis XIV. and had known La Grande Mademoiselle, which amounts to saying that M. de Saint-Pierre thought it due to his aristocratic dreams to get her to "name" one of his children, as they called it in those days. The honour of being her godson devolved upon the future author, who soon learnt to appreciate his good luck. Mme. de Bayard was a handsome old lady, who had preserved in her changed fortunes manners of exquisite courtesy and the airs of a queen. Reduced to all sorts of shifts, and constrained at such times to forget her pride, no sooner had she obtained the necessary money than she raised her head again, and hastened to prepare a fête for those who had obliged her with their purse. Her grace and dignity of manner made them her slaves. They would form a circle round her to listen to her stories of the hero Monsieur le Prince, of Louis XIV., amorous and gay, of the Grande Mademoiselle, grown old, and still weeping over the memory of the ungrateful Lauzun, of the wonders of Versailles, and of the romantic nocturnal revels on the grand canal at Fontainebleau. She told such good stories, had so much wit and cheerful kindliness, that no one ever had the heart to ask for a return of the loans they had made to her.
She brought into play the same fascinations to win the heart of the first comer, were it only a child, so that she appeared to her godson as a being quite apart, dazzling and adorable. He was not ignorant of the straits she was put to, and it had even happened to him, seeing her in tears, to slip his only silver-piece under her cushion; but none the less for that did she seem to soar above him in a superior world. Under her faded finery she was to him the personification of supreme elegance, and he was right. She talked as no one else in Havre knew how to talk, and in listening to her he was borne away to a new world peopled with great princes and beautiful princesses who welcomed Mme. de Bayard with distinction. He himself became a great noble and showered riches upon his beloved godmother. He would have been a poor creature not to prefer these beautiful dreams to gifts of any kind, and besides, the old Countess made presents just as she gave her fêtes, at the most unexpected moments. M. de Saint-Pierre respected her, and she had a great influence, and it was always a beneficent one upon little Bernardin's early education.
He was not an easy child to manage. Some one who knew Bernardin de Saint-Pierre very well, and who loved and admired him greatly,[1] said that he united in himself all the good and all the bad qualities of his brothers and his sister who were themselves neither ordinary nor accommodating, with the exception, perhaps, of the youngest of the boys. They were a nervous race, full of ambition, prompt to illusion, and bitterly resenting deception and injustice. "A single thorn," said Bernardin, "gives me more pain than the odour of a hundred roses gives me pleasure." He did not exaggerate, nature had exquisitely adapted him for suffering.
From his earliest years he showed himself to be of an unequal temper, which his father utterly failed to understand. The child was often lost in the clouds, or absorbed in the contemplation of a blade of grass, a flower, or a fly. One day when M. de Saint-Pierre was calling his attention to the beauties of the spires of the Cathedral of Rouen, he cried out in a sort of ecstacy: "Ah, how high they fly!" He had only noticed the swallows wheeling about in the air. His father looked upon him as an idiot, a strange undisciplined creature, and he was very far from guessing at what was taking place in the mind of his little son. The boy had unearthed from a cabinet an enormous folio containing "all the visions of the hermits of the Desert," taken from the Lives of the Saints. It became his habitual study, and from it he learnt that God comes to the help of all those who call upon Him. There could, therefore, be nothing for him to fear from his masters, his parents, old Marie, or in fact from any one. He could abandon himself in peace to his beautiful dreams, and withdraw himself into the ideal world, where his imagination showed him only tenderness, flowers, and sunshine. In case of need he would call God to his aid, and God would surely deliver him.