Free French Literature: A Very Short Introduction by John D. Lyons Page B

were the
people who lived among them. Country dwellers were no longer
seen exclusively as persons deprived of the advantages of the
city, for the life of the fields and the forests now seemed to offer
protection from the artifice and corrupting influences of the
city. This is a significant extension of the image that Jean de La
Bruyere, in his Caracteres, on les moeurs de ce siecle (1688), drew
of the pitiless and soul-less artificiality of Parisian and court life.
La Bruyere portrayed the culture of his time as corrupting and
created caustic images of the artificiality of the upper classes,
but did not go so far as to suggest that things are really better
outside the court and the city. Rousseau extended his critique
of urban civilization, already set forth in the Discourse on the
Origins oflnequality, in his Letter to d'Alembert on Spectacles
(J.J. Rousseau Citoyen de Geneve, a Mr. d'Alembert sur les
spectacles, 1758), in which he denounced the corrupting Parisian
theatre in favour of the honest festivities of the `happy peasants'
in the small cities of the provinces. Childhood took on a new
importance with Rousseau - it continues to be a significant
interest for the Romantics, starting with Chateaubriand.
Rousseau devotes a great deal of attention to his own childhood
in his autobiographical Confessions (finished in 1769, but
published in 1782). And in Emile ou De l'education (1762), an
exemplary narrative of a radically new form of upbringing,
Rousseau, in the role of tutor, permits his young pupil only
one book, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, in the hope that Emile will
model himself on the self-reliant Crusoe living in a state of
`nature'.

    In 1788, the year before the meeting of the Etats Generaux at
Versailles, which is customarily seen as the beginning of the
Revolution, Rousseau's younger friend Bernardin de SaintPierre (1737-1814), an engineer, published one of the bestselling novels of the 18th century, Paul et Virginie. It is the
quintessence of the nature versus culture theme of its time and created, in Virginie, a heroine whose abandonment of the
simpler ways of her childhood upbringing in the wilderness
leads directly to her death. The action of the novel takes
place in Mauritius, then known as the he de France, where as
children, Paul and Virginie grow up as best friends and almost siblings. At adolescence, their feelings change to romantic
love, but Virginie is sent away to live in France with a wealthy
and elderly aunt. When the aunt tries to force Virginie into
a marriage, she refuses and is sent back to the island. As the
ship nears land, a hurricane strikes and grounds the boat. The
last sailor on the vessel tries to convince the heroine to take off
her encumbering dress and swim to the land, but she refuses
and accepts her fate. The author is emphatic on this matter
of clothing and the quite dysfunctional modesty that Virginie
brought from her European education. Modern readers may be
tempted to laugh at the pathetic description of her corpse: `Her
eyes were closed; but the pale violets of death intermingled on
her cheeks with the roses of modesty. One of her hands was
on her dress, and the other, clutched to her heart, was tightly
closed...'. She grasps, of course, Paul's portrait.

    5. A scene from Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's novel Paul et Virginie (1787),
in a 1805 engraving after Francois Gerard

    Bernardin brought together, as did Rousseau, the concepts of
human nature and of nature in the sense of flora and fauna,
setting up the romantic idea that nature exists in a special
way in certain places, that by leaving the city one comes closer
to `nature', and by leaving Europe altogether one might find
nature unspoiled - or one might, at the very least, come to
a new understanding of oneself and of society by having a
different vantage point. Paul and Virginie develop as upright,
generous, frank, and somewhat austere young people not only
because they