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Updated: September 8, 2025
The background of pastoral landscape bears no necessary relation to the figures in the foreground. It exists for the sake of art rather than for the sake of life. This employment of the element of setting for a purpose essentially pictorial subsists in many later works of fiction, like the "Paul and Virginia" of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre.
Although the literature of France could boast of many men of great talent, such as La Harpe, who died during the Consulate, Ducis, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Chenier, and Lemercier, yet they could not be compared with Lagrange, Laplace, Monge, Fourcroy, Berthollet, and Cuvier, whose labours have so prodigiously extended the limits of human knowledge.
Bonaparte was very fond of Bernardin Saint-Pierre's romance of 'Paul and Virginia', which he had read in his boyhood. I remember that he one day tried to read 'Les etudes de la Nature', but at the expiration of a quarter of an hour he threw down the book, exclaiming, "How can any one read such silly stuffy. It is insipid and vapid; there is nothing in it. These are the dreams of a visionary!
Accordingly Arnolfi, a Bernardin friar, was sent from the Archduke Leopold, Governor of the Spanish Netherlands for the King of Spain, to the Duc d'Elbeuf, who, upon sight of his credentials, thought himself the most considerable man of the party, invited most of us to dinner, and told us he had a very important matter to lay before us, but that such was his tenderness for the French name that he could not open so much as a small letter from a suspected quarter, which, after some scrupulous and mysterious circumlocutions, he ventured to name, and we agreed one and all not to refuse the succours from Spain, but the great difficulty was, which way to get them.
The background of pastoral landscape bears no necessary relation to the figures in the foreground. It exists for the sake of art rather than for the sake of life. This employment of the element of setting for a purpose essentially pictorial subsists in many later works of fiction, like the "Paul and Virginia" of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre.
He seems a good fellow; the affectations of the angelic school have answered his purpose and succeeded, just as a woman succeeds when she plays the ingenue cleverly, and simulates surprise, youth, innocence betrayed, in short, the wounded angel. Modeste, recovering her first impression, renewed her confidence in that soul, in that countenance as ravishing as the face of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre.
Her mother's salon had been the coenaculum of the philosophy of the 18th century. Voltaire, Rousseau, Buffon, D'Alembert, Diderot, Raynal, Bernardin de Saint Pierre, Condorcet had played with this child, and fostered her earliest ideas. Her cradle was that of the Revolution. Her father's popularity had played about her lips, and left there an inextinguishable thirst for fame.
The court hunted not only in royal company, but accepted invitations from any seigneur who possessed an ample preserve and who could put up a good kill; magistrates, financiers and bishops, indeed all classes, became followers of the hunt. Montgaillard tells of a hunt in which he took part on the feast day of Saint Bernard, with the monks of the Bernardin Convent in Languedoc.
It was he who founded traveling on foot before Toepffer, reverie before "Rene," literary botany before George Sand, the worship of nature before Bernardin de S. Pierre, the democratic theory before the Revolution of 1789, political discussion and theological discussion before Mirabeau and Renan, the science of teaching before Pestalozzi, and Alpine description before De Saussure.
Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint Pierre was born at Havre on January 19, 1737. Like many boys that are natives of seaports, he was anxious to become a sailor; but a single voyage cured him of his desire for a seafaring life, although not of his love for travel. For some years afterwards he was a rolling stone, sometimes soldier and sometimes engineer, visiting one European country after another.
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