A VOYAGE TO THE ISLE OF FRANCE,

First English edition: 334 pages + 2 pages of publisher's adverts, book plate of Percival Bishop on the front paste down end paper, starting to wear at the front hinge, full mottled leather binding, rebacked preserving the original back strip, with red title label and decoration gilt on the spine, a very good copy.

Bernardin’s army service as an engineer on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean provided him with material for Voyage à l’Île de France (1773), with which he opened his literary career. The work brought him to the attention of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose friendship did much to mold the views expressed in Bernardin’s Études de la nature (1784; “Studies of Nature”). To the third edition of Études (1788) he appended Paul et Virginie, the story of two island children whose love for each other, begun in their infancy, thrives in an unspoiled natural setting but ends tragically when civilization interferes. In a later work, La Chaumière indienne (1790; “The Indian Cottage”), a traveler finds wisdom in the cottage of an Indian outcast. Cultural primitivism, which Bernardin was one of the first to celebrate, became one of the central ideas of the Romantic movement. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jacques-Henri-Bernardin-de-Saint-Pierre