Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's first book, Voyage à l'Ile de France (1773), published anonymously and with illustrations by Jean-Michel Moreau le jeune, has often been hailed as an 'abolitionist manifesto', yet the author devotes only a modest portion of the text to the condition of black slaves in Mauritius, under French colonial rule. To explain the predominantly abolitionist readings of Voyage à l'Ile de France, I propose to turn to the hitherto understudied period reception of the book, in order to posit that the original illustrations and the interaction between these and the text may have played an important part in orienting the interpretation of the work. In addition to addressing a lacuna in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre criticism, the following reflections on the reception of Voyage à l'Ile de France as an imagetext may also be viewed as a case study, making a contribution to the broader area of research into modes of reception of illustrated books in the Eighteenth century.