Jacques-Henri Bernardin of Saint-Pierre

See also: Bernardin

Jacques-Henri Bernardin of Saint-Pierre , born the January 19th 1737 with the Harbor and dead the January 21st 1814 with Éragny-on Oise, is a writer and a Botaniste French.

Showing as of childhood a spirit dreamer at the same time and adventurous, tasting the charms of nature, eager unknown, Bernardin of Saint-Pierre were anxious, irritable, easily rejected by the difficulties and the duties. After having learned in a priest, Caen, the elements of the old languages, he lute greedily Robinson Crusoé , and asked to travel on the sea. One of his/her uncles, captain of ship, which went to the Martinique, took it on its board; tirednesses of navigation and the service of the operations to which one compelled it made soon fall its illusions. Brought back in Le Havre and disgusted maritime life, it was put at the college at the Jésuites of Caen. Exciting with the thought of going to far converting the cruel people, his father calmed this enthusiasm while returning to make his philosophy with the college of Rouen. He entered then to the École of the Highways Departments, from where he passed in the body of young engineers whom the Minister for the war had established with Versailles. Sent in this quality to the army which was with Düsseldorf, its susceptibility and its insubordination made it relieve. It turned over in Le Havre, where his/her father had remarié himself. Not being able to agree with his mother-in-law, it came to Paris in 1760, almost without resources. The following year he asked to be sent as engineer to the island of Malta, which the Turks threatened and obtained it, but, the war not taking place, he returned to Paris with the intention to teach the Mathématiques.

Not finding pupils, it proposer, to escape from misery, to the Minister for the navy, from going to raise the plan of the coasts of England, proposal which remained unanswered. It then solved to try fortune abroad and, having borrowed some money, it left for the Holland, and from there went to Saint-Pétersbourg, full with hope in the known benevolence of the empress Catherine for the French. Equipped with a second-lieutenancy in the body of the genius, he did not manage to make approve with the government the project of a Company for the discovery of a passage to the the Indies by Russia. Passed in Poland to support the cause of Radziwill against Poniatowski, it met with Warsaw the beautiful princess Marie Miesnik, and conceived for her a passion whose “furies” did it congédier at the end of a few months. Left for Dresden with the intention to put itself at the service Saxony it went, following the gallant adventure most romantic which can be conceived, with Berlin, where it could not be fixed, and returned to France in November 1766.

Without resources, charged with debts, solicitant everywhere gotten rid of, Bernardin is then about to exchange its adventurous life against that of writer. He withdraws himself with City-with Avray, there rents a room in the priest, puts in order his observations and his travel souvenirs and writes Mémoires on Holland, Russia, Poland, Saxony, Prussia. He turns his systematic spirit towards hazardous speculations. “I collected, writes it, on the earthmoving of the observations, and I made of it a system so bold, so nine and so specious, that I do not dare to communicate it to anybody… I cling to all, and lets float that and there of wire, like the spider, until I can warp my fabric. ” These still delayed literary projects, he requested and obtained a patent of captain-engineer for the Ile de France and left in 1768. There remained three years there. Returned at Paris in June 1771, it started to attend the Company of the men of letters. D' Alembert presented it in the living room of Julie de Lespinasse but it there succeeds badly and was in general moved in the world of the Encyclopédiste S. It bound, thanks to close friends analogies, more narrowly with Jean-Jacques Rousseau with which it was going to walk to the countryside where they discussed lengthily together on nature and the human heart. Bernardin sought to soften the black melancholy of the philosopher and itself was reached by it. In the preamble to Arcadie , it is painted seeking loneliness: “With the sight of some walker in my vicinity, I felt very agitated, I moved away… In vain I called the reason with my help, my reason could not anything against an evil which stole its own forces to him. ”

However it had published in 1773 its Voyage to the Ile de France, the Island Bourbon, in the Cape of Good Hope, by an officer of the king (Amsterdam and Paris, 1773, 2 vol. in-8°), account in the form of letters with a friend where already the principal lines of its talent show through, and it prepared the publication of its Études of nature . It spent all the winter of 1783 to 1784 to recopy this work, to add to it, to cut off there. “The bear, said it, does not lick its small with more care. I fear, at the end, to remove the muzzle with the mien by lick it; I do not want there to touch any more. ” After the publication of the Studies (3 vol., 1784), the author, unknown, rejected and poor the day before, passed in a few days to the state of great man and favorite of the opinion. All that left its feather was ensured of success; pages like those of Paul and Virginia (1787), which does not meet, at its beginnings, the hoped reception and which, without the intervention of the painter Vernet, it would certainly have destroyed.

In 1792, at the age of fifty-five years, it married Félicité Didot, which had only twenty-two of them. The same year, it was named intendant of the Botanical garden of Paris to replace Buffon, place which was removed in 1793. Called, towards the end of 1794, to profess morals with the Teacher training school of year III instituted by the Convention, it appeared only two or three times in its pulpit and, in spite of the applause, recognized that it did not have the talent of the word. In 1795, it was named member of the Institut of France, in the class of language and literature, where it often had discussions sharp and full with sourness with those of his colleagues which it called the atheists, Naigeon, Volney, Morellet, Cabanis. It supported, starting from 1797, the revolutionary worship of the Théophilanthropie aiming at reinforcing the République by replacing Catholicism by another religion. Prize winner of the Academy of Besancon, it was elected French Academy in 1803.

Having lost his first wife, he married, in 1800, Désirée of Pelleport, young person and pretty person who calmed her last years before her death in her countryside of Éragny, on the edges of Oise. Of its first marriage, it had two children: Paul, dead young, and Virginia, married with the general of Gazan. Its second wife remaria with Aimé Martin.

One noticed at Bernardin of Saint-Pierre a major difference between the writer and the man; this one irascible, morose and troublesome; that one so soft, if calm, if to tend. Youth at the end of its life, the writer dreamed a kind of ideal republic, of which all the inhabitants would be linked by a mutual insurance company benevolence whereas least crumplings of the life irritated the nervous susceptibility of the man. No one to be was not less specific to carry out the world of order and harmony, this species of Éden or golden age, that the writer was obstinated to impose on nature. At the end and in cause of despair, Bernardin renonça with the continuation of his remote projects and, instead of wanting to carry out the things, it was warned to describe them. “The utopian with end of way, known as Holy-Beuve, seizes the feather and became a painter. These harmonies that it could not carry out on the ground, in the order political and civil, it required them of the study nature, and it told with consolation and delights what it foresaw: “All my ideas are only of the shades of nature, collected by another shade. But with these shades its brush mingled the sweetness and the light; it is enough for its glory. ” In Arcadie (Angers, 1781, in-18), kind of prose poem, Bernardin describes the ideal republic which he dreamed. In the Studies of nature (Paris, 1784, 3 vol. in-12), it had, according to its own words, initially have the idea to write a general history of nature but, renonçant in a too vast plan, it had been restricted to gather some portions of them. In the first part directed against the atheists, of which it makes partisans of the disorder and chance, it opposes the order and the harmony of nature to them, where it finds admirable topics for its talent. Towards the tenth study, it more directly begins the exposure of its sights and of the harmonies such as it conceives them: play of contrasts, the consonances and the reflections in all things. The last part of the work is especially relating to the company, its evils and the remedies that one can there bring. The merit and the originality of the author are to substitute for it, from one end to another, the feeling, the eloquence, the charm of the tables to science.

The talent of painter of the nature of Bernardin is apparent in its Paul and Virginia (Paris, 1787, in-12). Masterpiece of Bernardin, “which one would have sorrow to find during in another literature”, presents, on bottom of a landscape new and large, two gracious creations of figures teenagers, and painted human passion in all its flower and all its flame. “Almost all, in has known as Holy-Beuve, perfect, simple, decent and concerning, is moderated and enchanter. The images are based in the account and crown each portion discreetly of it, without drawing up themselves with effort and wanting to be made admire… What distinguishes this pastoral gracious forever, it is that it is true, of a human and significant reality. The graces and the plays of childhood does not succeed an ideal and fabulous adolescence. We are in passion, and this charming little book that Fontanes put a little too in a banal manner between Télémaque and the Death of Abel , I will classify it, me, between Daphnis and Chloé and this immortal fourth book in the honor of Didon. A genius all virgilien breathes there. ” The manuscript of Paul and Virginia , read in the living room of Suzanne Necker, in front of Buffon, Thomas, etc, did not have any success but, hardly printed, he was appreciated with his right value. Bernardin is, with less passion and more spirit, such perfect in the Indian Thatched cottage (Paris, 1790, in-8°), which, in its grace and its freshness, is a paradox, an attack against science. The tables offered by the Harmonies of nature (Paris, 1796, 3 vol. in-8°) carry the traces of all the exaggerations in the manner of their author, which made say to Joubert: “II has there in the style of Bernardin of Saint-Pierre a prism which wearies the eyes. When it a long time was read, one is charmed to see the greenery and the trees less coloured in the countryside than they are it in his writings. Its Harmonies makes us like the dissonances that he banished world and that one finds there with each step. ”

The other writings of Bernardin of Saint-Pierre are: Vœux of a recluse (Paris, 1789, in-12), which tends to reconcile the new principles with the old ideas; Memory on the need for joining a menagerie to the national Garden of the plants ( ibid , 1792, in-12); Of the Nature of morals (1798, in-12); Voyage in Silesia (1807, in-12); the Death of Socrate , Drama, preceded by a Test on the newspapers (1808, in-18); Coffee of Surate , satirical tale; Test on J. - J. Rousseau and accounts of voyage .

Its complete Œuvres was initially published by Aimé Martin (Paris, 1813 -20,12 vol. in-8°), edition several times reproduced under various formats. The same editor also published the Correspondance of Bernardin of Saint-Pierre (1826, 4 vol. in-8°), his posthumous Œuvres (1833 - 1836, 2 vol. in-8°), and his Romans, tales, opuscules (1831, 2 vol. in-18).

Works

Voyage to the Ile de France, the island Bourbon and the Cape of Good Hope , 2 vol. (1773)
Arcadie (1781)
Studies of nature (3 vol.) (1784)
Paul and Virginia (1787)
the Indian Thatched cottage (1790)
Coffee of Surate (1790)
Wishes of a recluse (1790)
Of the nature of morals (1798)
Voyage in Siberia (1807)
Harmony of nature (3 vol.) (1815)

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