Returning home once again, he made the acquaintance of D’Alembert and of other leading men of letters in Paris, and, particularly, of Rousseau, his philosophical master. At the period of the Great Revolution of 1789, St. Pierre lost his post as superintendent of the Royal Botanical Gardens under the old Bourbon Government, and he found himself reduced to poverty; and although his sympathies were with the party of constitutional, though not of radical, reform, the supremacy of the extreme revolutionists (1792-1794) exposed him to some hazard by reason of his known deistic convictions. Upon the establishment of the reactionary revolution of the Empire, St. Pierre recovered his former post, and, with the empty honour of the Imperial Cross, he received the more solid benefit of a pension and other emoluments. His writings have been collected and published in two quarto volumes (Paris, 1836). Of these, after his celebrated romance, perhaps the most popular is _La Chaumière Indienne_ (“The Indian or Hindu Cottage”). His principal productions are _Etudes de la Nature_ (“Studies of Nature”), _Vœux d’un Solitaire_ (“Aspirations of a Recluse”), _Voyage à L’Ile de France_ (“Voyage to Mauritius”), and _L’Arcadie_ (“Arcadia”). His merits consist in a certain refinement of feeling, in charming eloquence in description of natural beauty, and in the humane spirit which breathes in his writings. Of the _Paul et Virginie_ he tells us-- “I have proposed to myself great designs in that little work.... I have desired to reunite to the beauty of Nature, as seen in the tropics, the moral beauty of a small society of human beings. I proposed to myself thereby to demonstrate several great truths; amongst others this--that our happiness consists in living according to Nature and Virtue.” He assures us that the principal characters and events he describes are by no means only the imaginings of romance. In truth, it seems difficult to believe that the genius of the author alone could have impressed so wonderful an air of reality upon merely fictitious scenes. The popularity of the story was secured at once in the author’s own country, and it rapidly spread throughout Europe. _Paul et Virginie_ was successively translated into English, Italian, German, Dutch, Polish, Russian, and Spanish. It became the fashion for mothers to give to their children the names of its hero and heroine, and well would it have been had they also adopted for them that method of innocent living which is the real, if too generally unrecognised, secret of the fascinating power of the book. It is thus that he eloquently calls to remembrance the _natural_ feasts of his young heroine and hero:--