Paul and Virginia and the wreck of the Saint-Géran

An 18th-century bestseller

In 1788 Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre published Paul et Virginie, a short novel set on the Isle de France, as Mauritius was called under French rule. The author knew the island from his own stay there. The book was a huge success and placed Mauritius firmly in the European imagination.

The story

Paul and Virginie are raised as brother and sister by two single mothers, Marguerite and Madame de la Tour, in a secluded valley on the island. As teenagers they fall in love, but their mothers think them too young to marry. Under pressure from her family, Madame de la Tour sends Virginie to France. After a little over two years apart, the girl finally sails home, but her ship is caught in a storm and wrecked near the coast. Virginie drowns before the eyes of Paul, who can do nothing to save her and later dies of grief.

The real wreck: the Saint-Géran

The tragedy draws on a real event. On the night of 16 to 17 August 1744, the Saint-Géran, a French East India Company ship that had sailed from Lorient, struck the reefs of Île d'Ambre (Amber Island) off the north-east coast. Many passengers and sailors died, several women among them. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, who reached the island some years later, gathered the memory of the disaster and wove it into his novel.

The wreck is now regarded as part of the heritage of the Republic of Mauritius and has been the subject of several underwater archaeology campaigns, most recently a multidisciplinary mission in 2022.

Where to see what remains

The National History Museum in Mahébourg, housed in a colonial mansion built around 1772, displays objects recovered from the Saint-Géran, as well as from another wreck, the frigate La Magicienne.

A vast literary legacy

The novel inspired operas, paintings and writers: echoes of it appear in Balzac, in Flaubert (Madame Bovary, A Simple Heart), in Dickens and Maupassant. Closer to our time, it fed into The Blue Lagoon (1908) and Godard's Pierrot le Fou. In Mauritius, the names Paul and Virginie are still everywhere, on streets, hotels and sculptures.

Read it before you go

The text is short and in the public domain: an ideal read on the plane, before you discover the landscapes it describes, from mountains and forests to the lagoon.