The Lovers from the Island of Mauritius: Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and his book “Paul Virginie”

Many places on the island of Mauritius are home to reminders of the famous work of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, considered the father of French Romanticism and a close friend of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His heroes, Paul and Virginie, young lovers who grew up as brother and sister, even as twins, in the wilds of the exotic island, met a tragic fate and died in their own blood without realizing their pure love.

The history of Paul Virgini

A hysterical bestseller until World War I

“Paul Virginie” is one of the most widely read French books, and new editions of it are constantly being printed. Paul Virginie, the creations of de Saint-Pierre’s imagination, his “adopted children,” as he called them, became a legend that made waves throughout the world and inspired many artists, from its publication in 1788, on the eve of the outbreak of the French Revolution. French Revolution Until the First World War, if not until our own day, although we have been somewhat forgotten.

From sculptures, paintings, engravings, exhibitions, plays, operas, songs (like the one called “Paul Virginie” by Celine Dion), television series, musical comedies, films, to comic book albums, Paul Virginie, like Romeo and Juliet, has become a myth.

Many writers, including some of great stature, such as Stobrien, Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant, and Lamartine, not only read the book but were also influenced by it. Many fan fictions (fanfiction) were written in its wake, including some with happy endings or endearing parodies.

It is also one of the first novels to spawn an entire industry of related products – from postcards and children’s books to snuff boxes, loose tea in various flavors and scents, jewelry, fabrics, falcons, printed plate sets, lamps and clocks. Many hotels and restaurants on the island of Mauritius are named “Paul Virginie”.

Who is Bernardin de Saint-Pierre?

Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, engineer-adventurer-author-botanist, born in 1737 in the city of Le Havre in Normandy – second in importance to that of Marseille, wrote the famous novel after his stay, from 1768 to 1770, on the island of Mauritius, which at that time was called Île de France (“Island of France”). France").

After years of poverty, he managed, after many requests, entreaties and efforts, to join as an engineering officer on the royal expedition that sailed to Madagascar. After falling out with its commander, he remained on the Île-de-France, as the guest of a generous landowner, Pierre Poivre, one of the island's most prominent administrators, an adventurer and an active botanist who devoted himself to the development of spices, and the designer of the magnificent Pamplemousses Garden, a renowned tourist site.

It was to Pierre Poivre and the entourage of scientists at his court that de Saint-Pierre owed his passion for botany. During these two years, de Saint-Pierre influenced the island's colonial governor, the Count de la Bourdonnais, who had been wildly logging its forests and mercilessly exploiting its resources, to show a little more friendliness towards nature.

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre was one of the pioneers of the “greens.” During his stay on the island, he also discovered the abject living conditions of the slaves under the whip of their masters, and in the novel he wrote, he sharply denounces them, although he does not call for the abolition of slavery. In his spare time, he wrote the draft of his book that would promote tourism in Mauritius better than the best of the marketing and advertising companies and spread his fame throughout the world.

The pen as a brush

The literary salon of Madame Suzanne Necker, the mother of Madame de Stael, one of the most prestigious and influential in Paris, where the first reading of the novel was held, did not receive it with the expected appreciation – the important guests did not stop yawning.

The bitter failure made the writer doubt his talent. If it weren't for the painter Claude Joseph Vernet, he would undoubtedly have destroyed his work. Vernet, who specialized in painting seascapes, ports, and storms, knew how to appreciate de Saint-Pierre's magnificent descriptive skills and dissuaded him from his plan. He did well.

The descriptions of the sea, rivers, mountains, and nature in general in de Saint-Pierre's work, which ends with a terrifying hurricane, are like the brushstrokes of the greatest of landscape painters. "Your pen is a brush," Napoleon wrote to him. And more. In addition to the unique and rare descriptive value, many rich layers are added that open up diverse possibilities for interpretation and expansion.

Each period looks at the work differently, each profound literary critic adds to his predecessors. Many eternal issues, in the realm of state, religion, philosophy, culture, body and soul, are raised in it openly and covertly. This is not at all a bland, sugary, tear-jerking shepherd story as its opponents have presented it.

The success of “Paul Virginie” changed the life of its author

The popular success of the story “Paul Viriginy,” which has the hallmarks of a classic tragedy, was immediate. For someone who had known dark, sad, and poor times, life smiled on him this time. 25 million copies were sold, it was translated into 30 languages, and it was also the first book to be published in a paperback edition, according to the idea and initiative of de Saint-Pierre himself.

The happy author received thousands of letters from readers, especially female readers, which continued until his death in 1814. With his characteristic smugness, Bernardin called his admirers “Bernardines.” Many readers named their children after the young heroes.

And even the happy de Saint-Pierre himself, who married for the first time at the age of 56, named the children born to him by his 20-year-old sweetheart “Paul” and “Virginie.” In his later years, the author even organized a kind of crowdfunding for an illustrated edition of the novel, in which many painters and engravers took part.

The success of “Paul Virginie” changed the author’s life. He was elected a member of important cultural institutions, including the most prestigious of them all – the French Academy.

After wandering as a lone backpacker, between temporary assignments and one job or another, in the Netherlands, inMalta, in Russia, in Poland, in Austria, in Germany, in the islands of the Indian Ocean, when he falls passionately in love with this or that unattached woman, he is now a family man, dividing his time between his residence inParis, attends the meetings of the Academy, and cultivates his garden in the pastoral village house, which he received as repayment from a debtor, at Éragny-sur Oise, about 30 km northwest of the capital. In this private paradise he died in 1814, at the age of 77 and was buried in the cemetery Pere Lachaise.

The novel's characters and their living conditions

Virginie is the daughter of Madame de la Tour, fromNormandy, who married a man who did not belong to the same noble class as her, against the opinion of her family and as punishment, left her without a dower, that is, in need of everything. And after she followed her husband to the distant islands, where he hoped to make a fortune, she was left a widow with a small child.

Paul is the son of Marguerite, a peasant daughter from Brittany, who, after getting pregnant by a rural nobleman who promised her marriage and abandoned her to sighs, sailed to the islands to hide what was considered a disgrace and disgrace at that time.

Madame de la Tour joins Marguerite and the two mothers live in harmony with their children along with a pair of black slaves bought with money, Dominique and Marie. Life is conducted in autarky, in two cabins. A deep friendship prevails between the two women despite their different class origins. Dominique and Marie are part of the family.

The social cell lives in harmony, cultivating the land and living off the blessings of nature. The beginning of the novel tells the story of four adults and two children who live simply on an island within an island, on land that is not easy to cultivate but that, thanks to their dedication, becomes a piece of paradise.

The two mothers of the family, Madame de la Tour and Marguerite, are apparently not interested in recreating the European society that rejected and vomited them out of its bosom and do not need the rules of the degenerate mother's culture. The babies who grew up together did not learn to read and write, but they know nature well and navigate their way according to it.

Paul works in the fields and Virginia helps her mothers in and around the house. Their integration into the island landscape and their mutual love are symbolized by the two coconut trees that their mothers planted when they were born. The two trees grew in tandem, their branches intertwined over the spring waters, and both bore fruit.

In the small, ideal society, people work and live to exist, love, and enjoy, not to produce, exploit, and accumulate. The four adults' primary concern is the happiness of their two children and the security of their future.

The scourge of European barbarism

The novel begins with drama, develops as a pastoral, and ends in tragedy. The arrival of a letter from Madame de la Tour's wealthy aunt heralds the end of the happy period. It is preceded by a worrying change in Virginie's behavior, who has lost her joy in life.

The onset of adulthood is described as a deep blue that gnaws at her body and gnaws at her soul. The innocent embrace of the two children, who slept together naked and frolicked in nature, now takes on a different dimension that the adolescent girl sees as a sin and can no longer bear the presence of her partner.

Despite Paul's strong opposition, who does not understand what is happening to his soulmate and does not want to part with her under any circumstances, Virginie accepts the rich aunt's invitation: If you come and stay with her, the aunt writes, you will receive a proper education, a good match, and a fat mistress.

With the support of the representatives of the European order there, the governor and the priest (support that is more like pressure), Virginie sails to France. After a stay of more than two years during which she was educated and studied in a convent and after refusing the conditions that she had to fulfill in order to win her rich aunt's inheritance, Virginie returns to the island. The ship she is on, Le Saint-Gérand, cannot withstand the storm, breaks down and sinks, not far from the coast. Virginie is not among the survivors.

The most intense scene in the novel is undoubtedly Virginie's drowning, which occurred before the eyes of the narrator, several other islanders, and her lover Paul, who tried desperately to come to her aid but in vain. And the reader's breathless gaze joins those who witnessed the disaster.

All the passengers of the ship jumped into the water. And here appears Virginie, stretching out her arms to Paul and waving her hand to the rest of the people, as a sign of farewell. All the sailors jumped into the water, except one, the bravest of them all, naked and muscular as Hercules, who knelt in awe before the girl, determined to save her, and asked her to take off her heavy clothes.

But she refuses, rejects him and looks away from him. The visionaries in the dramatic picture shout to the sailor: “Save her, save her!” But here comes a terrible wave, as high as a mountain, roaring towards the ship. The sailor, seeing the danger, leaps into the water alone. Virginie, one hand holding her clothes and the other pressed to her heart, her peaceful gaze lifted to the sky, disappears from the eyes of the onlookers, like an angel taking off for the games.

Christianity and paganism, modesty and excitement are embedded in the picture. Why does Virginie reject the sailor's help if not because she is attracted to his naked, masculine, seductive body? Virginie, a Latin virgin, as her name suggests, is revealed as a Christian saint who resists temptation and prefers to die rather than sin.

Virginie's body was washed up by the sea as she held the picture of Paul to her heart – her loyalty was unquestioned, her ideal love unspoiled, the soul triumphed over the body. Paul was named after the first of the Pharisees, Paul the Egyptian, who retired to the Theban desert at the age of 22 and lived in a cave until the day he died. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre was immersed in the lives of missionaries and saints as a child and dreamed of living and dying like them. This tendency towards mysticism and solitude finds expression throughout the novel.

But above and beyond the triumph of the spirit and the union of lovers in death (Paul will not live long after the death of his beloved, without whom his life would have no meaning), the novel can be seen as a fierce criticism of the hypocrisy and corruption of European society, which led to the deaths of two innocent young people and the destruction of the lives of many others.

Beneath the formalities lies real violence. The devastation wrought by the tropical storm on the island even before Virginie's departure coincides with the disease that gnaws at her. The roaring wave that drowned her, its black thighs and white foam on its peaks, resembles a raging bull. All of these symbolize the names inflicted on her by the European heritage, even before she left the island.

Why did the story have to end in tragedy? Because Virginie's two mothers, whom European morality condemned to exile, were tainted with feelings of guilt for having hurt him. Madame de la Tour for lowering herself from her status and Marguerite for striving to surpass him.

The new world annihilated and, against its will, recreated the old world from which it had tried to escape. The little paradise remained polluted by the prejudices and European prohibitions that had prevented it from lasting. Virginie heard the miserable story of her mothers, her longing for the realms of their childhood, their lamentations, their weeping, their shame. And where was the source of their downfall if not in the meeting with the man who betrayed and disappeared and in the pregnancy that caused such a painful change in their lives?

The inhabitants of the old continent call the islanders “savages,” and Madame de la Tour’s wealthy aunt pretends to want to save Virginie from their savagery and give her a proper education and a bright future.

Well, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre believes the opposite. He puts his opinion in the mouth of Paul, who denounces Virginie's mother as a "barbarian mother" who decided to send her daughter to "barbarian Europe." Virginie will become a victim of Western barbarism, just as her two mothers were twenty years earlier. Virginie's fate repeats theirs, and with greater force. Like the black slave who tried in vain to escape the cruelty of the white master, Virginie will not be saved either.

If the sailor who failed in his efforts to save Virginie is Paul's double, then the slave girl, whom Virginie tried in vain to save, is her own double. Paul, who had witnessed the drama from the shore, jumped into the sea to try to save Virginie, who was tied to his waist with a rope. Virginie's heavy clothes, which she refused to remove and for which she paid with her life, symbolize the shackles of religion, education, and culture that had sunk her into the depths.

Like her, a slave who escaped from her master's yoke, whose scars – the disgrace of Western culture – were stamped on her body, she wandered for a month in the mountains, starving, dressed in rags and in great despair, "thought of drowning herself" – a hint in the meters to Virginie's own choice of death.

The slave has no choice but to return to her master, and despite his promise that he will no longer be cruel to her, he rushes, after Paul and Virginie leave, to tie her again, this time to a log by her neck and ankles. The author uses the trick of doubles – the sailor represents Paul, the slave represents Virginie – to convey the message: Virginie, who was supposedly born free, was bound as a slave by the wrong values ​​of society.

Imagination and reality

Besides the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau evident in the book, many critics also note the combination of optimism and pessimism inherent in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's character, who was irritable and annoying, affectionate and gentle at the same time.

All his life, de Saint-Pierre believed in the possibility of establishing an ideal republic in which the inhabitants would be united in kindness and brotherhood. During his wanderings in his youth, he even tried to realize this dream. Upon arriving in Moscow, he secured a meeting with Empress Catherine to present to her his plan to establish a utopian settlement on the shores of Lake Arles, but he did not receive her support.

In the novel “Paul Virginie,” pessimism prevails over hope. The final catastrophe is foreshadowed from the very beginning in the description of the two ruined huts surrounded by barren land and wild nature, in the threat of the stormy sea and the destructive power of the tropical summer, and above all in Virginie’s excessive sensitivity, which turns into sadness and illness at the end of her childhood.

Virginie is presented as a Christian saint in the drowning scene, but also as an adolescent girl whose conflict in her soul between her turbulent sexual urge and the strict dictates of her conscience leads her to self-destruction and even to choosing death. Is this an acquired disease only, or does heredity also play a part? Another topical issue, regarding the place of acquisition and heredity in the outbreak of afflictions, is implied in the book.

Paul and Verizini, who grew up as brother and sister and did not realize their love – the fiction born in de Saint-Pierre's imagination finds an echo in the author's own life, whose relationship with his sister arouses discomfort in readers of the letters she sent him.

Catherine, who adored her brother immensely, and for whom she had an ambivalent, impossible love, rejected all her numerous suitors and spent her adult life until her death in a shelter for the poor and sick run by nuns in the city of Dieppe. Other clinical cases are documented in the de Saint-Pierre family, including his son, Paul, who was also hospitalized throughout his adult life.

Another point of intersection between imagination and reality is the sinking of the ship Le Saint-Geran – a historical event that served as a source of inspiration for the author. The circumstances of the sinking of the historical Le Saint-Geran differ from those of the Le Saint-Geran in the story. Not a storm but a navigational error, which caused the ship to run aground on a coral reef, caused the disaster that occurred after a quiet moonlit night, on the blackness of August 18, 1744, in which 172 of the ship’s 181 passengers lost their lives.

According to the survivors' testimonies, on the deck of the ship, next to the mast, remained an engaged couple, Captain Montandre and his girlfriend Mademoiselle Kew, who were about to get married upon reaching the island. The officer asked his fiancée to take off her clothes and jump into a life raft with him, but she refused: she preferred to die than be seen naked.

Her loving partner gave up his life to die with her. He kissed a lock of her hair that he had kept between the pages of a pocket book, took her in his arms, and so they embraced. The reality this time is no less shocking than the fiction that was derived from it for the novel. The memorial stone erected by the Historical Society of the Island of Mauritius a hundred years after the disaster does not separate the two. And so it is written on it:

Off this coast, on the night of August 17-18, 1744, the Saint-Germain went down to the depths, whose sinking was immortalized by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre in the novel Paul Virginie.