Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1787) ostensibly exalts the wholesome values of a pastoral life style, that is to say, a life lived in harmony with nature, governed by virtue, and uncontaminated by the hierarchical divisiveness found in more materialist (European) environments. If one probes beneath the rhetorical surface, however, a vein of materialistic greed, hypocritical posturing, and class-conscious pretentiousness can be detected in the behavior and discourse of the primary protagonists. Indeed, as the novel comes to a close, the primary protagonists’ articulated attachment to rustic primitivism is revealed to be little other than a discursive pose that masks a desire for social distinctiveness, perhaps even cultural dominance. In this reading of the novel, the tragic tone of the narrative is attributed not to the heroine’s untimely death (viewed by the narrator as part of the natural order of things) but to its ultimate irrelevance. Although Virginie was briefly idolized in the immediate aftermath of her death—in a span of just twenty years, the physical trace of her existence and influence has all but disappeared; her legacy can be kept alive only in the oral discourse of an aging recluse. Although there is evidence to suggest that the “petite société” hoped to transform their sector of l’île de France into a parallel society wherein virtue and Christian subservience would serve as exemplary models for the other islanders, the community is destroyed from within by greed, self-interest and vanity, the very values the protagonists rhetorically condemned, but ultimately embraced.