Paul et Virginie : The Shipwreck of an Idyll

Abstract

Paul et Virginie'. The Shipwreck of an Idyll Lieve Spaas Surely no novel has known more extremes of critical acclaim than Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie (1788). Poorly received when it was read by the author at the salon of Mme de Necker, it became hugely popular when it appeared on the eve of the French Revolution, but has again become the object of contempt of many readers and critics. Set in the French colony of L'île de France (now Mauritius), Paul et Virginie is of considerable anthropological interest and encapsulates its author's ambivalence about colonial society. Its eponymous protagonists are two fatherless children whose mothers had befriended each other and whoboth acted against society's norms. BecauseMme de la Tour, Virginie's mother, had married a man whose social class made him unacceptable to her family, the couple chose to leave France and make a new life in the French colony. Shortly afterward, the husband died on a slave-buying expedition to Madgascar. Marguerite, Paul's mother, from a simple and loving farming family, had placed her faith in a "gentilhomme" who promised to marry her but, "ayant satisfait sa passion,"1 left her pregnant without any support. These equally impoverished women of different social backgrounds act as the quasi-parental couple to the two children and bring them up as brother and sister. 1 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Paul et Virginie, ed. Jean-Michel Racault (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1999), p. 1 19. References are to this edition. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, volume 13, numéros 2-3, janvier-avril 2001 316 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION The colonial island becomes an earthly paradise where, in spite of the poverty, this "family" live in perfect harmony, together with the two black slaves they have managed to buy. However, the paradise is not to last. Virginie is called back to France by a wealthy aunt who wants her to be educated and inherit her fortune. But Virginie is miserable in France and, two years later, having refused to marry the man her aunt has chosen for her, she is disinherited and sets sail for l'île de France to be reunited with Paul and her "parents." As the ship approaches the shore of the island, with Paul and the family already within sight, the ship is wrecked and Virginie drowns. This disastermarks the end ofparadise. The entire family dies shortly afterwards, leaving behind a lonely old man who had been a supportive neighbour and friend to the two women and their children. The old man tells the story of Paul and Virginie to a visitor to the island some twenty years later when nothing remains but the ruins of the two women's cabins. The novel, one must admit, may not be a literary masterpiece. But one still wonders what it was that aroused such extremes of critical acclaim , eliciting either exceptional veneration or profound contempt. What triggered such contrasting emotional responses? Is there an underlying theme or structure that stirred some hidden memory or prompted some archetypal identification? Certainly the shipwreck, which signifies the destruction of the idyll, has had particular resonance for the novel's admirers and detractors, and continues to call for a revaluation. To examine these questions, I shall start with a brief account of the very mixed reception of the novel and then explore the ambiguity inherent in this primitive Eden. I shall identify some troubling narrative instances that show how an underlying perversion threatened to destroy this and how, therefore, Virginie's return to marry Paul to create a family was an idyll which like her ship had to be wrecked. Finally, I shall question the many critics who purport to scrutinize the biographical and historical origins of the story yet ignore the vital evidence to be found in over one hundred letters that the author's sister, Catherine, wrote to her beloved brother, Bernardin, and in which she expresses her wonder at "the personal details" she recognized when reading Paul et Virginie. Let us first recall the immense success of the book and its author on publication. At the time of the French Revolution, Paul et Virginie was PAUL ET...