French literature before the Revolution was more barren of reference to childhood than was English literature. Especially is this true of the eighteenth century, with its superficial disbelief and its bitter protest against superstition, under which term was comprehended the supernatural as well as the preternatural. There were exceptions, as in the case of Fénelon, and the constitutional sentiment of the French was easily moved by the appeal of dependent childhood. In Rousseau one may read how it is possible to weep over children, and yet leave one’s own to the cold mercy of a foundling asylum. It is in Rousseau’s disciple, however, Bernardin de St. Pierre, that we find the most artistic expression of pure sentimentalism, and the story of Paul and Virginia is an effort at representing a world where childhood, in its innocence, is conceived of as the symbol of ideal human life. St. Pierre thought of childhood and nature as possessed of strong negative virtues; they were uncontaminated, they were unsophisticated. To escape from an evil world, he fled in imagination to an island of the tropics, where all that life required was readily furnished by lavish nature. He makes his family to consist chiefly of women and children. The masculine element is avoided as something disturbing, and except for the harmless old man who acts as chorus, it is discovered first as a rude, barbaric, and cruel force in the person of the governor of the island, who has no faith in Madame de la Tour, and in the person of the planter at the Black River, who has been an inhuman master to his slave. The childhood of Paul and Virginia is made to have a pastoral, idyllic character. Their sorrows and misfortunes come wholly from evils which lie beyond their control. St. Pierre brought back a golden age by ignoring the existence of evil in the heart of man; he conceived it possible to construct an ideal world by what was vaguely expressed in the words “a return to nature.” As he reflects in the story: “Their theology consisted in sentiment like that of nature; and their morality in action like that of the gospel. Those families had no particular days devoted to pleasure, and others to sadness. Every day was to them a holiday, and all which surrounded them one holy temple, where they forever adored an Infinite Intelligence, almighty and the friend of humankind. A sentiment of confidence in his supreme power filled their minds with consolation for the past, with fortitude for the present, and with hope for the future. Behold how these women, compelled by misfortune to return to a state of nature, had unfolded in their own bosoms, and in those of their children, the feelings which nature gives us, our best support under evil!”