Bernardin de St. Pierre

by Arvède Barine

He did in fact call upon Him, and God came, as He always comes to those who cry to Him in faith. One day, when his mother had punished him unjustly, he prayed to heaven to open the door of his prison, and to make known his innocence. The door remained closed, but a ray of sunlight suddenly pierced the gloom and lighted up the window. The little prisoner fell upon his knees, and burst into tears in a transport of joy. The miracle was accomplished. It is with a ray of sunshine that God has ever opened the prisons of His children.

But the more Providence showed an interest in him, the more ungovernable he became. The child so gentle, so compassionate to animals, became passionate and violent, whenever the shocks of real life unhinged him, so that he was almost beside himself. His father raged, and then it was that the godmother interfered. She, who understood it all, found her godson interesting, and while she comforted him tenderly, she pacified and reassured his parents. To her he owed his recall from exile after some innocent escapade which had terrified his family. To her he owed some of his masters. To her he owed the book which determined the bent of his mind, and the influence of which one can trace everywhere in his works: Robinson Crusoe.

Mme. de Bayard had made him a present of it, just at a moment when it was thought necessary to change the current of his thoughts. Before he was twelve he had set his heart upon becoming a Capucine monk, ever since the time when Brother Paul had taken him with him for a tour on foot through Normandy. The journey had been a perpetual enchantment, one long junketing. They stopped at the convents, at the country houses, with well-to-do peasants, and there was nothing but feasting and kindliness everywhere. Brother Paul told stories all the way, the weather was fine, the fields were in bloom, and little Bernardin adored nature, whom nobody just then seemed to think much about, with the exception of one other dreamer who had found her "dead in the eyes of men," and who was just then engaged in resuscitating her. But as yet young Saint-Pierre did not even know the name of J. J. Rousseau. He only knew that in the country "the air is pure, the landscape smiling, walking pleasant, and living easy"; that he was very happy, and never wished to do anything else in the future than to watch the growth of the plants, and listen to the woodland sounds. He made up his mind to take the monk's habit and staff in order to be able to spend the rest of his days wandering about the lanes, and this resolution he announced as soon as he reached home. His father laughed at him, his godmother gave him Robinson Crusoe.

This book had a great influence upon his career. It suggested to him the idea of his famous island, where Friday was replaced by a people whom Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, by wise laws and by force of example, had recalled to the "innocence of the golden age." The more he reflected upon it the more the enterprise appeared to him practicable and worthy of a man's powers, so much so that, having served as the sport of his imagination, it became the aim of his existence. After some months, no longer able to curb his impatience, he obtained leave to embark for Martinique in a vessel belonging to one of his uncles. It seemed to him quite impossible that he should not find somewhere on the wide ocean a desert island, of which he would make himself king. Nevertheless, the impossible happened, and he returned to Havre greatly disappointed but not discouraged. While awaiting another opportunity he matured his plans, in which the suppression of all schools held a prominent place. Time only served to strengthen him in his design, and we shall find him giving up the best part of his youth to the search for his island. His long journeys had no other object. Being unable to find it, he wished at least to demonstrate to the world what it might have been, and he laboured indefatigably to describe it. One of the results of this fortunate obstinacy is entitled Paul and Virginia. We can understand that Bernardin always preserved a feeling of the liveliest gratitude towards his godmother and towards Robinson Crusoe.

It was again Mme. de Bayard, who on his return from Martinique interposed to see that he finished his studies. M. de Saint-Pierre did not trouble himself about it, being discouraged by the capricious and senseless method in which his incorrigible son studied. He yielded, however, and sent Bernardin to the Jesuits at Caen, who completed the work begun by the Lives of the Saints and Robinson Crusoe. They made their pupils read the narratives of their missionaries, and those great voyages to foreign countries, the daring adventures, the sublime sufferings, the martyrs and the miracles finally set on fire the imagination of young Bernardin. He worked no more, played no more, talked no more, entirely given up to his determined resolution that he also would become a missionary and go upon these wonderful voyages, and be a martyr too. The Jesuit father in whom he confided, smiled, but did not discourage him. M. de Saint-Pierre hastened to recall him, and old Marie went to meet him outside the town to say, with tears in her eyes, "Then you mean to become a Jesuit?" That was the first blow to his vocation. The grief of his mother, and the lectures of Brother Paul finally put an end to it, and he thought no more of becoming a martyr.

He had suffered an irreparable loss during his sojourn at Caen. Mme. de Bayard was dead; there was no longer any one to pour peace into that restless and sombre nature. It became more and more true that "all his sensations developed at once into passions," and more than ever he sought a refuge from reality in dreams which his age made dangerous. Eager for solitude, isolated in the midst of his companions, he became absorbed in his visionary projects, and expended upon the phantoms of his imagination the vague emotions that oppressed him.

He sustained another loss equally calamitous to him though for very different reasons. His mother died while he was finishing his studies at Rouen, and with her disappeared the peaceful joys and sunshine of the home, and her son was astonished to discover that at the first vacation he had no longer any wish to return there.

The thought was new and painful. The following year he went to Paris, with the intention of becoming an engineer, and when he had been there a year, he heard that his father had married again and was no longer to be counted upon to help his sons. One of them was a sailor, the other a soldier. Bernardin found himself alone in the streets of Paris, without money, and almost without friends. His real education was about to commence. He was twenty-three, good-looking, very impressionable, with a delicate, keen imagination, courage, and unstable character.

Almost all his biographers have deplored the use he made of his time up to the age of thirty and after. It is true that in the eyes of prudent people, who approve of a regulated career with promotion at stated intervals, his entrance into the world must appear absurd, even reprehensible. No one could make a worse bungle of his future than he did, his excuse is that it was not intentional. On the contrary, he took great pains to seek appointments, and believed himself to be a model employé. But instinct, stronger than reason, constantly drove him from a line which was not his own. He has very happily expressed in one of his works[2] the combat which takes place under such circumstances in a highly-endowed mind.

He has just said that among animals, it is upon the innate and permanent instinct of each species that depend their character, their manners and, perhaps, even their expression. "The instincts of animals, which are so varied," he continues, "seem to be distributed in each one of us in the form of secret inward impulses which influence all our lives. Our whole life consists in nothing else but their development, and it is these impulses, when our reason is in conflict with them, which inspire us with immovable constancy, and deliver us up among our fellows to perpetual conflicts with others and with ourselves." Bernardin de Saint-Pierre knew of these struggles with instinct by his own experience. Thanks to them he was so fortunate as to succeed in nothing for twelve years, and to be in the end obliged to abandon himself in despair to those "secret inward impulses," which predestined him to take up the pen. But prudent people have never forgiven him for his inability to settle down, and they have suggested that his conduct was detestable.