French Classics

by William Cleaver Wilkinson

The plot of “Paul and Virginia” is simplicity itself. Two young French widows—widows we may euphemistically call the women both, though the mother of Paul had never been married—meet, strangers to each other, in Mauritius, and their children, Paul and Virginia respectively, grow up from babyhood together, as if brother and sister, in a state of nature such as never was anywhere in the world outside of a romance, until at last, Virginia undertaking a vain voyage to France to bring round a rich alienated aunt of her mother’s, perishes by shipwreck on her return; in prompt sequel of which calamity, all the remaining personages of the tale, down to the very dog, naturally and sentimentally, one after another, die. The story is represented as told to a traveler in the Isle of France by a sympathetic old man who had been an eye-witness of all.

Two extracts, one from the beginning, and one from the end, of the romance, will sufficiently indicate its quality.

Paul and Virginia being now about twelve years of age, Virginia goes, accompanied by Paul, to restore to the master a runaway female slave to whom he had been cruel, and to intercede with him on the sufferer’s behalf. She has accomplished her purpose, and the two have set out to return. They lose their way. This is the state of the case at the point at which our first extract begins, as follows:

“God will have pity on us,” replied Virginia; “he listens to the voice of the little birds which ask him for food.” She had scarcely uttered these words when they heard the noise of water falling from a neighboring rock. They hastened to it, and, after having quenched their thirst at this spring clearer than crystal, they gathered and ate a few cresses which grew on its banks. As they were looking around them to find some more substantial nourishment, Virginia descried a young palm-tree among the trees of the wood. The cabbage which is found at the top of this tree, inclosed within its leaves, is an excellent food; but although its stalk is not thicker than a man’s leg it was more than sixty feet high. The wood of this tree is indeed composed only of a collection of filaments; but its internal bark is so hard that it blunts the sharpest hatchets, and Paul had not even a knife. He thought of setting fire to this palm-tree at its foot. Another difficulty—he had no steel to strike fire with, and besides, in this island so covered with rocks, I do not believe it would be possible to find a single flint. Necessity inspires industry, and often the most useful inventions have come from men reduced to extremity. Paul resolved to light a fire after the manner of the negroes. With the sharp end of a stone he made a small hole in the branch of a tree that was very dry, which he placed under his feet; he then with the edge of the stone made a point to another branch equally dry, but of a different kind of wood. He next placed the piece of pointed wood in the small hole of the branch which was under his feet, and turning it rapidly round in his hands, as one turns a mill to froth chocolate, he in a few moments perceived smoke and sparks arise from the point of contact. He collected together dry herbs and other branches of trees, and set fire to the foot of the palm-tree, which soon afterward fell with a violent noise. The fire served him also in stripping the cabbage of the long woody and prickly leaves which enclosed it. Virginia and he ate a part of this cabbage raw, and the rest cooked in the ashes, and they found them equally agreeable to the taste.... After their meal ... an hour of walking brought them to the banks of a large river, which barred their way.... The noise of its waters terrified Virginia; she dared not try to ford it. Paul accordingly took Virginia on his back, and passed thus laden over the slippery rocks of the river, regardless of the turbulence of the waters. “Fear not,” said he to her; “I feel myself very strong with you.” ... When Paul had passed over, and was on the bank, he wished to continue his journey laden with his sister, flattering himself that he could ascend in that manner the mountain of the Three Peaks, which he saw before him at the distance of half a league; but his strength soon began to fail, and he was obliged to set her on the ground and to throw himself down beside her.... Virginia plucked from an old tree, which hung over the banks of the river, some long leaves of hart’s tongue which hung down from its trunk. She made of these a kind of buskins with which she bound her feet, which the stones of the way had caused to bleed, for in her hurry to do good she had forgotten to put on her shoes. Feeling herself relieved by the freshness of the leaves she broke off a branch of bamboo and began to walk, leaning with one hand on the cane and with the other on her brother.

In this manner they walked on slowly through the woods; but the height of the trees and the thickness of their foliage made them soon lose sight of the mountain of the Three Peaks, by which they had directed themselves, and even of the sun, which was already setting. After some time they quitted, without perceiving it, the beaten path which they had till then followed, and found themselves in a labyrinth of trees, shrubs, and rocks, which had no farther outlet. Paul made Virginia sit down, and ran almost distracted in search of a path out of this thick wood; but he wearied himself in vain. He climbed to the top of a lofty tree, to discover at least the mountain of the Three Peaks, but he could perceive nothing around him but tops of trees, some of which were illuminated by the last rays of the setting sun. Already the shadow of the mountains covered the forests in the valleys; the wind was going down, as is usual at sunset; a profound silence reigned in these solitudes, and no noise was heard but the cry of the stags who came to seek repose in these unfrequented recesses. Paul, in the hope that some hunter might hear him, cried out as loud as he could: “Come! Come! and help Virginia!” But only the echoes of the forest answered to his voice and repeated several times successively: “Virginia! Virginia!”

Paul now descended from the tree, overcome with fatigue and disappointment; ... he began to weep. Virginia said to him: “Do not weep, my dear, unless you wish to overwhelm me with grief.... O! I have been very imprudent.” And she began to shed tears. Nevertheless, she said to Paul, “Let us pray to God, my brother, and he will have pity on us.” Scarcely had they finished their prayer when they heard the barking of a dog.... “I believe,” said Virginia, “it is Fidèle, our house-dog.”

Of course all turned out happily. A rescue party had come in search of the estray, and they were soon brought with rejoicing home.

Such as the foregoing passage will have served to show is the charm of unfallen simplicity and innocence represented by St. Pierre to have been cast, forming as if an Eden in the wilderness, about these happy children of nature on whom society had had no chance to exercise its baneful power. True, they suffered, though in Eden. True, others sinned, as well as suffered, about them, for there was slavery and there was cruelty; but that was in the wilderness outside; in Eden they did not sin. It was all Rousseauism in experiment and reduced to absurdity. By Rousseauism we indicate the doctrinal dream of that dreamer; by no means the actual waking practice of the man that dreamed.

It may seem a strange marring of the idea of a sufficiency in nature, let nature but be unhindered by society, to renew the world in the purity of paradise, that the end of the idyll of Paul and Virginia should have come about through an effort on the part of Virginia’s mother, made quite in the spirit of the present artificial order of things, to secure a bequest from an aunt of hers in France, whom the niece had offended by marrying as she did; but so it was. Virginia undertakes the necessary voyage, and, as we have already said, perishes by shipwreck on the coast of Mauritius in returning. The heart-rending agony of the final catastrophe we have no space to exhibit. The author seems to hint that Virginia might have been saved, could she have brought herself to assent to the desire of an entreating honest stalwart seaman that she should disembarrass her person of her clothes. It is almost the step taken from the sublime to the ridiculous for the author to make his heroine perish thus as a martyr to her own invincible modesty.

The bereaved mother has visions of her departed daughter’s accomplished felicity in the world unseen. These she describes to the neighbor, who, a venerable old man, tells the traveler the tale. Now for the final extract from the text of the book: