ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies what the author take to be some regressive tendencies in French culture of the later eighteenth century, within a framework of historical explanation. It offers detailed readings of three remarkable novels which were best-sellers of the period. The city is identified with 'le monde' — which means fashionable society, high civilization, or worldliness itself. Each visit serves to motivate a moral and social if not also political critique. The cadre of social privilege, and the fixed forms of received high culture, are finally shed in Paul et Virginie. Bernardin's quasi-Edenic 'Ile de France' is in the other hemisphere, but its name makes it also the region containing Paris and the island within France. Diachronically we can in fact trace a parallel with the social ideology that leads to the Revolution. The chapter concludes to bringing out various elements that the fictions share — broadly in turn spatial, familial, psychological and literary.
