INTRODUCTION.

HENRI-JACQUES BERNARDIN DE ST. PIERRE was born at Havre in 1737. anecdotes are related of his childhood, indicative of the youthful author, strong love of nature, and his humanity to animals.

Many - of his

That "the child is father of the man" has been seldom more strongly illusAt eight years of age he took the greatest pleasure in the regular culture. of his garden, and possibly then stored up some of the ideas which afterward appeared in the "Fraisier." His sympathy with all living things was extreme. In "Paul and Virginia" he praises, with evident satisfaction, their meal of milk and eggs, which had not cost any animal its life. It has been remarked, and possibly with truth, that every tenderly disposed heart, deeply imbued with a love of nature, is at times somewhat Brahminical. St. Pierre's certainly was.

When quite young he advanced with a clenched fist toward a carter who was ill-treating a horse. And when taken for the first time by his father to Rouen, having the towers of the cathedral pointed out to him, he exclaimed, "My God! how high they fly!" Every one present naturally laughed. Bernardin had only noticed the flight of some swallows who had built their nests there. He thus early revealed those instincts which afterward became the guidance of his life; the strength of which possibly occasioned his too great indifference to all monuments of art. The love of study and of solitude were also characteristics of his childhood. His temper is said to have been moody, impetuous, and intractable. Whether this faulty temper may not have been produced or rendered worse by mismanagement, cannot now be ascertained. It undoubtedly became afterward to St. Pierre a fruitful source of misfortune and of woe.

The reading of voyages was with him, even in childhood, almost a passion. At twelve years of age his whole soul was occupied by Robinson Crusoe and his island. His romantic love of adventure seeming to his parents to announce a predilection in favor of the sea, he was sent by them with one of his uncles to Martinique. But St. Pierre had not sufficiently practised the virtue of obedience to submit, as was necessary, to the discipline of a ship. He was afterward placed with the Jesuits at Caen, with whom he made immense progress in his studies. But it is to be feared he did not conform too well to the regulations of the college, for he conceived from that time the greatest detestation for places of public education. And this aversion he

has frequently testified in his writings. While devoted to his books of travels, he in turn anticipated being a Jesuit, a missionary, or a martyr; but his family at length succeeded in establishing him at Rouen, where he completed his studies, with brilliant success, in 1757. He soon after obtained a commission as an engineer, with a salary of one hundred louis. In this capacity he was sent (1760) to Dusseldorf, under the command of Count St. Germain. This was a career in which he might have acquired both honor and fortune; but, most unhappily for St. Pierre, he looked upon the useful and necessary etiquettes of life as so many unworthy prejudices. Instead of conforming to them, he sought to trample on them. In addition, he evinced some disposition to rebel against his commander, and was unsocial with his equals. It is not, therefore, to be wondered at, that at this unfortunate period of his existence he made himself enemies; or that, notwithstanding his great talents, or the coolness he had exhibited in moments of danger, he should have been sent back to France. Unwelcome, under these circumstances, to his family, he was ill received by all.

A prize in the lottery had just doubled his very slender means of existence, when he obtained the appointment of geographical engineer, and was sent to Malta. The Knights of the Order were at this time expecting to be attacked by the Turks. Having already been in the service, it was singular that St. Pierre should have had the imprudence to sail without his commission. He thus subjected himself to a thousand disagreeable incidents, for the officers would not recognize him as one of themselves. The effects of their neglect on his mind were tremendous; his reason for a time seemed almost disturbed by the mortifications he suffered. After receiving an insufficient indemnity for the expenses of his voyage, St. Pierre returned to France, there to endure fresh misfortunes; and the pressure of poverty drove him to Holland. He was well received at Amsterdam by a French refugee named Mustel, who edited a popular journal there, and who procured him employment, with handsome remuneration. St. Pierre did not, however, remain long satisfied with this quiet mode of existence. Allured by the encouraging reception given by Catherine II. to foreigners, he set out for St. Petersburg. Here, until he obtained the protection of the Maréchal de Munich and the friendship of Duval, he had again to contend with poverty. The latter generously opened to him his purse, and by the Maréchal he was introduced to Villebois, the Grand Master of Artillery, and by him presented to the empress. The empress, with the rank of captain, bestowed on him a grant of fifteen hundred francs; but when General Dubosquet proposed to take him with him to examine the military position of Finland, his only anxiety seemed to be to return to France: still he went to Finland; and his own notes of his occupations and experiments on that expedition prove that he gave himself up in all diligence to considerations of attack and defence. He who loved nature so intently seems only to have seen in the extensive and majestic forests of the North a theatre of war. In this instance he appears to have stifled every emotion of admiration, and to have beheld alike cities and countries in his character of military surveyor.

On his return to St. Petersburg he found his protector, Villebois, disgraced. St. Pierre then resolved on espousing the cause of the Poles. He went into Poland

with a high reputation, that of having refused the favors of despotism to aid the cause of liberty. But it was his private life, rather than his public career, that was affected by his residence in Poland, and, owing to a sorrowful love affair with the Princess Mary, he left Poland for Germany.

In 1766 he returned to Havre; but his relations were by this time dead or dispersed, and after six years of exile he found himself once more in his own country, without employment, and destitute of pecuniary resources.

The Baron de Breteuil at length obtained for him a commission as engineer to the Isle of France, whence he returned in 1771. In this interval his heart and imagination doubtless received the germs of his immortal works. Many of the events, indeed, of the " Voyage à l'Ile de France are to be found, modified by imagined circumstances, in "Paul and Virginia." He returned to Paris poor in purse, but rich in observations and mental resources, and resolved to devote himself to literature. By the Baron de Breteuil he was recommended to D'Alembert, who procured a publisher for his "Voyage," and also introduced him to Mlle. de l'Espinasse. But no one, in spite of his great beauty, was so ill calculated to shine or please in society as St. Pierre. His manners were timid and embarrassed, and, unless to those with whom he was very intimate, he scarcely appeared intelligent.

St. Pierre, in his "Préambule de l'Arcadie," has pathetically and eloquently described the deplorable state of his health and feelings, after frequent humiliating disputes and disappointments had driven him from society; or rather when, like Rousseau, he was "self-banished" from it.

"I was struck," he says, "with an extraordinary malady. Streams of fire, like lightning, flashed before my eyes; every object appeared to me double, or in motion; like Edipus, I saw two suns. . . In the finest day of summer I could not cross the Seine in a boat without experiencing intolerable anxiety. If, in a public garden, I merely passed by a piece of water, I suffered from spasms and a feeling of horror. I could not cross a garden in which many people were collected; if they looked at me, I immediately imagined they were speaking ill of me." It was during this state of suffering that he devoted himself with ardor to collecting and making use of materials for that work which was to give glory to his name.

St. Pierre asked Rousseau, in one of their frequent rambles, if, in delineating St. Preux, he had not intended to represent himself. "No," replied Rousseau; "St. Preux is not what I have been, but what I wished to be." St. Pierre would most likely have given the same answer, had a similar question been put to him with regard to the Colonel in "Paul and Virginia." This, at least, appears the sort of old age he loved to contemplate and wished to realize.

For six years he worked at his "Études," and with some difficulty found a publisher for them. M. Didot, a celebrated typographer, whose daughter St. Pierre afterward married, consented to print a manuscript which had been declined by many others. He was well rewarded for the undertaking. The success of the “Études de la Nature" surpassed the most sanguine expectation, even of the author. Four years after its publication St. Pierre gave to the world "Paul and Virginia,” which had for some time been lying in his portfolio. He had tried its effect, in manuscript,

on persons of different characters and pursuits. They had given it no applause, but all had shed tears at its perusal; and perhaps few works of a decidedly romantic character have ever been so generally read or so much approved. Among the great names whose admiration of it is on record, may be mentioned Napoleon and Humboldt.

He continued writing and publishing successfully, and in 1792, about thirteen days before the celebrated 10th of August, Louis XVI. appointed St. Pierre superintendent of the "Jardin des Plantes." Soon afterward the king, on seeing him, complimented him on his writings, and told him he was happy to have found a worthy successor to Buffon.

Although deficient in exact knowledge of the sciences, and knowing little of the world, St. Pierre was, by his simplicity and the retirement in which he lived, well suited at that epoch to the situation. About this time, and when in his fiftyseventh year, he married Mlle. Didot.

In 1795 he became a member of the French Academy. On the suppression of his place, he retired to Essonne. It is delightful to follow him there, and to contemplate his quiet existence. His days flowed on peaceably, occupied in the publication of "Les Harmonies de la Nature," the republication of his earlier works, and the composition of some lesser pieces. He enjoyed in his old age a degree of opulence which, as much as glory, had perhaps been the object of his ambition. In any case, it is gratifying to reflect that, after a life so full of chance and change, he was, in his latter years, surrounded by much that should accompany old age. His day of storms and tempests was closed by an evening of repose and beauty.

Amid many other blessings, the elasticity of his mind was preserved to the last. He died at Eragny sur l'Oise, on the 21st of January, 1814.

St. Pierre's merit as an author has been too long and too universally acknowledged to make it needful that it should be dwelt on here. A careful review of the circumstances of his career induces the belief that his writings grew (so to speak) out of his life. In his most imaginative passages, to whatever height his fancy soared, the starting-point seems ever from a fact. The past appears to have been always spread out before him when he wrote, like a beautiful landscape, on which his eye rested with complacency, and from which his mind transferred and idealized some objects without a servile imitation of any. When at Berlin he had had it in his power to marry Virginia Tanbenheim; and in Russia Mlle. de la Tour, the niece of General Dubosquet, would have accepted his hand. He was too poor to marry either. A grateful recollection caused him to bestow the names of the two on his most beloved creation. Paul was the name of a friar with whom he had associated in his childhood, and whose life he wished to imitate. How little had the owners of these names anticipated that they were to become the baptismal appellations of half a generation in France, and to be re-echoed through the world to the end of time!

THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE.

I HAVE attempted a great object in this little work. I have undertaken to describe a soil and vegetation differing from those of Europe. Long enough have our poets placed their lovers on the banks of streams, in meadows, and under the foliage of the beech. I have desired to locate mine on the shore of the sea, at the foot of cliffs, in the shade of cocoanut trees, bananas, and citrons in bloom. Nothing is needed in the other quarter of the globe but a Theocritus or a Virgil, that we may have scenes at least as interesting as those of our own land. I know that travellers of taste have given us enchanting descriptions of many isles of the South Sea; but the customs of their inhabitants, and particularly those of the Europeans who settle there, often mar the landscape. It has been my aim to unite the beauty of nature in the tropics with the moral beauty of a small domestic circle. I have also designed to bear testimony to a number of great truths, among others the following: that our happiness consists in living according to nature and virtue. Nevertheless, it has not been necessary for me to compose a romance in order to describe happy families. I can state with truth that those of which I am about to speak had an actual existence, and that this narrative is in most respects true. It was related to me as such by many inhabitants of the Isle of France. I have added nothing to it except certain unimportant circumstances, which, however, being within my own experience, are in this respect also real. When, some years since, I drew up a very imperfect sketch of this pastoral, I requested a fair dame, who moved in high life, and grave men who were far removed from it, to listen to the reading of this tale, that I might gain some previous idea of the way in which it might affect readers of such different character. I had the satisfaction of beholding them all shed tears. This was the only criticism I could draw from them, and, indeed, it was all I desired. But as great imperfection accompanies small talents, this success inspired me with the vanity of giving to my work the title of "A Picture of Nature." Happily, I recollected how little known to me was nature in the clime even where I was born; how, in the countries whose productions I had seen only as a traveller, nature is rich, varied, lovely, magnificent, and mysterious; and how much I was lacking in the perception, taste, and expression needful in understanding and describing her. Thus I returned to my senses. I have consequently included this feeble essay under the title and in the sequel of my "Studies of Nature"; in order that this title, recalling my incapacity, should be a perpetual reminder of the weakness to which I had yielded.