Paul et Virginie Reading Order

Paul et Virginie (1788) by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre is the founding text of the French tropical imagination — the story of two children, Paul and Virginie, raised in natural virtue on the Île de France (now Mauritius), isolated from European society by their mothers' voluntary exile, and destroyed when Virginie is sent to France to be educated and returns to find that social convention has made reconciliation with Paul impossible. The novel is the most sustained fictional embodiment of Rousseau's philosophy: natural childhood is innocent and happy; European civilization is corrupt; the return to civilization destroys the natural happiness it cannot replace. Saint-Pierre was a close friend of Rousseau and the novel reads as the fictional application of Émile's education program applied to a tropical Paradise. The description of the island landscape, which takes up much of the novel, established the French exotic genre and influenced Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and every subsequent French writer who used the tropics as the setting for a meditation on innocence and civilization. The scene of Virginie's drowning — she refuses to remove her dress to swim to shore, choosing death over immodesty — became one of the most famous scenes in French literature and provoked both admiration and parody.