"Paul et Virginie" by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and illustrated by Maurice Leloir - Paris, Librairie Artisque - H. Launette, Paris, 1888 first thus edition - 25cmx18cm - condition: very good, in original decorated binding, minor rubbing, frontispiece and all in-text illustrations present. Paul et Virginie (sometimes known in English as Paul and Virginia) is a novel by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, first published in 1788. The novel's title characters are friends since birth who fall in love. The story is set on the island of Mauritius under French rule, then named Île de France. Written on the eve of the French Revolution, the novel is recognized as perhaps Bernardin's finest work.[1] It records the fate of a child of nature corrupted by the artificial sentimentality of the French upper classes in the late eighteenth century. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre lived on the island for a time and based part of the novel on a shipwreck he witnessed there.