Reading Order
Paul et Virginie Reading Order
Paul et Virginie (1788) by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre is the most influential French prose idyll of the eighteenth century and one of the founding texts of Romanticism — a short novel about two children raised in a state of nature on the Île de France (Mauritius), who fall in love, are separated when Virginie is sent to France to be educated, and are destroyed when the ship bringing her back founders in a storm within sight of shore. The novel is philosophically Rousseauist — the thesis that nature is good and civilization corrupts, that the innocent children raised in a tropical paradise are more virtuous and happy than the corrupted Parisians who claim them — and sentimentally Christian (the consolation of the afterlife frames the tragedy). But what made Paul et Virginie famous in its own time and influential on the Romantic generation was its landscape: the detailed, precise evocation of the tropical island's flora, light, and climate — Saint-Pierre spent two years on Mauritius and the natural description is exact — gave French Romantic literature its first model of landscape as emotional and philosophical agent. The novel was the most-read French fiction of the Revolutionary period and gave Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and Hugo the template for the use of nature as the primary emotional register of Romantic prose.
Where to start
Paul et Virginie (1788) — the novel is short (about 130 pages) and can be read in a single sitting. The best English translation is by John Donovan for Oxford World's Classics; the Garnier-Flammarion French edition has the best annotation. Read before Chateaubriand's Atala and René to understand what those works inherit from Saint-Pierre; the tropical natural description that Chateaubriand carries to America descends directly from Saint-Pierre's Mauritius.
Complete Paul et Virginie Book List
- 1Buy
Paul et Virginie
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre·1788·Published 1788 as part of the Études de la Nature (vol. 4). Initially slow to sell, it became enormously popular during the Revolutionary period and went through hundreds of editions in the nineteenth century. The storm scene in which Virginie drowns rather than undress before the sailors who could save her was the most celebrated scene in eighteenth-century French fiction.
Paul et Virginie — Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Virginie drown in Paul et Virginie?
The most famous episode in Paul et Virginie is the storm scene in which the ship bringing Virginie back from France, the Saint-Géran, founders in a storm within sight of the shore. A sailor swims to the ship and offers to carry Virginie to safety, but she refuses to undress — removing the clothing that would impede swimming — because of modesty. She drowns, making the gesture of farewell to Paul on the shore. The episode was enormously famous in its time and generated an enormous controversy: critics saw it as a criticism of false modesty (a girl who had been raised in nature, without the false shame of civilization, should have been able to undress to save her life), while the novel's admirers saw it as the culmination of the novel's argument — that Virginie, corrupted by the false shame instilled in her European education, dies not from the storm but from civilization's corruption of her natural innocence. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre clearly intended the latter reading, and the scene is the novel's most precise philosophical statement: it is not the storm that kills Virginie but the education that France imposed on her. The famous Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre painting by Guérin (1797) of Virginie on the sinking ship became one of the iconic images of French Romantic sentimental painting.
Monthly Newsletter
Never miss a big release
Get the most anticipated upcoming books delivered to your inbox once a month — no spam, no filler.
Monthly only. Unsubscribe anytime.
Book links are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, BookReleaseRadar earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.