The author uses fiction to convey the theme that "happiness consists of living according to the dictates of nature and virtue." The novel takes place in the Mauritius and is a classic French romantic novel. Like Rousseau, his friend and mentor, Bernardin de St. Pierre was a great literary apostle of the return to nature. In Paul et Virginie, first published in 1788 in the fourth volume of his Etudes de la Nature, Bernardin drew on his three-years' residence as a government official in Mauritius for his first-hand description of the exotic scenery of that island paradise. The novel, detached from the ponderous Etudes, became a European best-seller for half a century. The book was a great favorite with English readers, and helped to establish a vogue for the exotic in fiction."