The Real Paul and Virginia

— The Paul et Virginie of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre at once became a classic, and so is likely to be read forever. Its readers will always wonder how far the touching story is true and how real its personages were. The author wrote without winking that it was “ower-true.” He gave a precise confirmation of its genuineness, with date and names. One day, he says, while walking in the king’s garden at Paris, a lady, accompanied by her husband, approached him. Having assured herself that she was addressing the author of Paul et Virginie, she spoke these words : “ The person whose unhappy end you have so truthfully described in the shipwreck of the Saint-Géran was my relative. I am a creole of the island of Bourbon ” (Réunion).

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre added: “I afterwards learned that the lady was the wife of M. de Bonneuil, first valet de chambre of Monsieur [the future Loui XVIII.]. This lady has since permitted me to publish her testimony to the truth of the disaster, and has related to me circumstances well calculated to add to the interest of the deaths of this sublime victim of virginal modesty and her unfortunate lover.”

This statement would have entered into authentic literary history if an inconveniently curious Academician had not looked through the documents in the case some fifty years later. The shipwreck of the Saint-Géran was due to its running aground off the Ile de France (now Mauritius). The French were then masters of the island, and, following their constant administrative traditions,they made copious procès-verbaux of the event. The ship was wrecked on the 17th of August, 1744, but it was only in 1821 that these records came to light in the archives of the Court of Appeals of the island of .Bourbon. Whatever details of the shipwreck were in the possession of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre must have been gathered by him from hearsay in 1760, the year of his visit to the Isle of Franee. Making all allowance for the growth of a legend during the sixteen years after the shipwreck, we have still to conclude with M. Lemontey that Paul et Virginie and the story of its confirmation as well are pure creations of genius. The few possible hints which the imaginative writer may have received from the accounts of the real shipwreck are scarcely more than the two unconnected newspaper items to which Robert Louis Stevenson ascribed the genesis of his Pavilion on the Links.

First of all, there was a Mademoiselle Caillon, who was on the forecastle as the vessel was going down. A second lieutenant of the ship itself, M. Longchamps de Moutendre, was climbing along the side in order to jump off, when he spied the woman, and went back to try to persuade her to follow his example. That was all of the real idyl.

Second, and quite apart from the former fact, Edme Carret, who was in charge of the life-boat, testified that he called out to the captain, Delamare, just as the ship was beginning to sink, “ Monsieur, leave off your jacket and breeches, and you will save yourself more easily.” The captain answered, “ It is not decent for one in my office to get to land naked, and I have papers in my pockets which I must not leave.” And this was all of the heroic modesty, which is none the less worthy of esteem because it was mixed up with the fidelity of a brave mariner to his charge.

The other idyllic scene, in which Paul and Virginia find a common shelter from the rain under her upturned jupon, is an idealized reminiscence of what the author acknowledged he had once seen in his youth in the Faubourg Saint-Marceau of old Paris. The scene in which Virginia goes to the planter of the Black River to beg his pardon for a runaway slave was inspired by the similar intercession made in Poland in favor of a fugitive serf by the Princess Marie Miesnik. The romance of “ bleeding Poland ” was a part of the sentiment of court circles in France before the Revolution. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, like a true literary workman (whose heart is put into his work), took the name of his heroine — Virginie de La Tour — from two love-affairs of his own. At one time of his wandering early life he was to have been married in Berlin to Virginia Taubenheim. In his youth his family intended to marry him to Mademoiselle de La Tour, a niece of General Bosquet. Paul was the religious name of a friar to whom he was much attached. It was the age of Rousseau, — a fin de siècle of what Schiller rightly named (and perhaps not wrongly praised) Sentimentalität.