SOURCE: Buchanan, Michelle. “Savages, Noble and Otherwise, and the French Enlightenment.” Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 15 (1986): 97-109.

[In the following essay, Buchanan claims that the invention and idea of the Noble Savage became a notable element of literature, fiction, and drama in eighteenth century France because the belief was important in the thought of the French Enlightenment.]

The notion of the French philosophes' humanistic view of the savage continues to find wide acceptance, along with the belief in the capital role played by Montaigne and Rousseau in the development and concretization of the concept of the Noble Savage. Both commonplaces, having too long served as a springboard for studies of philosophical, aesthetic, political, and economic issues, should now take their place among the myths which underpin the thesis of the nobility of Man in Nature.

The belief in the importance of the Noble Savage in the thought of the Enlightenment gave rise to the corollary belief in its conversion into a notable element of fiction and drama in the literature of eighteenth-century France. Setting aside the possible relationship between life in nature and utopistic or socialistic societies, which is the chief premise of René Gonnard's La Légende du bon sauvage (1946), and accepting the reality of a continuing interest in exoticism which Gilbert Chinard endeavors to prove in L'Amérique et le rêve exotique dans la littérature française au XVII^eet au XVII^esiècle (1913), an attempt must be made to determine whether “le bon sauvage” is indeed an important link in the chain of philosophical and psychological elements which so decisively change the substance of French literature during the eighteenth century, or whether he is one of many stock characters used by writers much as they did “le bon mari,” “la bonne mère,” “le bon père” (Marmontel), “le père de famille” (Diderot), among others.

From de Lisle's Arlequin sauvage (1721) through Marmontel's Les Incas (1777) to the end of the century when Chateaubriand's Atala (1801) heralds the dawn of Romanticism, who are those savages and what role are they given in the literature of eighteenth-century France?

In Voltaire's Candide (1759) Cacambo is of mixed-blood, from Mexico, but hardly a savage. At one point in the story, master and servant find themselves prisoners of fifty Oreillons, a savage tribe in Paraguay. The naked savages are getting their cooking pots and spits ready to roast the two men whom they have mistaken for Jesuits. Fortunately Cacambo speaks some Oreillon and persuades the savages that Candide is not a Jesuit and has in fact just killed one. Adds Cacambo “I am persuaded you are too well acquainted with the principles of the laws of society, humanity, and justice, not to use us courteously, and suffer us to depart unhurt.”¹ The scene is farcical: Cacambo extolling the Oreillons' civic virtues while they are all standing before boiling cauldrons. Indeed the Oreillons release the two prisoners and show them “all sorts of civilities: offer them girls, give them refreshments, and reconduct them to the confines of their country, crying before them all the way, in token of joy, ‘He is no Jesuit, he is no Jesuit!’”²

L'Ingénu of Voltaire, first published in 1767, becomes in one English translation The Child of Nature, in another The Simple Soul, again in another The Huron. The hero is a Huron and a fine lad he is: “His head was uncovered, and his legs bare; instead of shoes, he wore a kind of sandals. From his head his long hair flowed in tresses, while a small, close doublet displayed the beauty of his shape. He had a sweet and martial air.”³ He speaks excellent French, and the first thing his French hostess notices is his complexion of lilies and roses. The Huron delights everyone with his pleasant manners taught him, along with the language, by a Frenchman. But early in the second chapter, we find out that l'Ingénu is really his hosts' nephew. Voltaire has fun with his pseudo-Indian who needles his new-found family and friends about their religious practices and love problems. We are not surprised to see that in the end l'Ingénu, who now lives in Paris under a different name, becomes an excellent officer in the king's army and is “respected by all honest men, being at once a warrior and an intrepid philosopher.”⁴

The Tahitians in Diderot's Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, published posthumously in 1796, are directly borrowed from Bougainville's own Voyage autour du monde (1771), and the old Tahitian's warning to his people that they will rue the day they welcomed foreigners to their beautiful island is based on an encounter that Bougainville had with a Tahitian chief. The captain of the king's navy had written many pages describing the loveliness of the South Pacific islands he had discovered, but philosophes and “beaux-esprits” chose to focus their attention on the few which recounted the islanders' sexual freedom. In the Supplément Diderot praises Tahitians, above all, for their lack of religious binds and sexual restraints. Diderot's spokesman is the Tahitian Orou who argues for the Tahitian way of life against a French priest whose counterarguments, based on the narrowest of religious constraints, lose the debate. The priest's forensic loss simply reinforces, metaphorically, his actions; he has already, before his discussion with Orou, slept with Orou's Number One daughter, now sleeps with Number Two, then on the third night with the third daughter, often crying out in the dark “but what of my religion! What of my priesthood!” And on the fourth night, he sleeps with his host's wife so as not to displease him.

Towards the end of the century, in 1788, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre published Paul et Virginie, often cited among works dealing with the notion of a simpler life in the midst of nature's bounty. Paul et Virginie does have an exotic island setting, but for all the simple life Paul's and Virginie's families lead, social distinctions remain as rigid as in Parisian society. Virginie's well-born mother is “Madame de la Tour,” while Paul's unwed mother is “Marguerite.” The two servants, Domingo and Marie, are blacks, one from Senegal, the other from Madagascar, and they spend their days seeing to the comfort of their mistresses and young charges. They are slaves who, like Paul's dog Fidele, are totally devoted and loving with Paul and Virginie. After Virginie, Paul, and their mothers die, we are told that “the Governor took care of Domingo and Marie, who were no longer able to labour, and who survived their mistresses but a short time. As for poor Fidele, he pined to death soon after he had lost his master.”⁵ The death of the slaves, symbols of kind devotion and utter simplicity of mind, and the dog's death are noted together in one short paragraph.

So, where in eighteenth-century French literature are the “noble” or “bons” savages who stand before the malevolence of civilized society, reminding morally bankrupt men and women of the lifeforce they forfeited when they forgot the ways of nature? Are they to be found, or are they only a too-long abused literary cliché?

Preliminary research to establish a bibliography revealed the paucity of works dealing with the subject. There seems to have been no study of the savage until 1911 when Gilbert Chinard brought out his L'Exotisme américain dans la littérature française au XVI^e siècle, followed in 1913 by the aforementioned L'Amérique et le rêve exotique. In 1928, Hoxie Neale Fairchild published The Noble Savage, a Study in Romantic Naturalism in English Literature, in which the fourth chapter is devoted to some eighteenth-century travelers, among them Rousseau. As a starting point for his short analysis of Rousseau's role in the development of the concept of the Noble Savage, Fairchild uses Lovejoy's statement that Rousseau's Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité represents “a movement away from rather than towards primitivism.”⁶ More recent scholarship on the Discours has consistently defended the position that Rousseau's primitive condition is not the natural state of the “bon sauvage,” but rather a mythical state, which therefore never existed, and to which, if it had existed, we should not want to go back.⁷

In 1946, René Gonnard's La Légende du bon sauvage deals with the legend's important contribution to the development of communistic and socialistic forms of government, as the lack of concept of property in the “bon sauvage” environment maintained the principle of equality between all savages. A couple of Gonnard's examples can lead to the conclusion that he has not read carefully some of the works he mentions.

In 1950, John Kennedy's Jesuit and Savage in New France gives interesting historical information on the Jesuit missions and on the relationships between Jesuit and savage in the New World.

In 1971, when Michèle Duchet published her study Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des Lumières, she acknowledged that her initial idea had been to study the theme of the “bon sauvage” from Montaigne to Raynal, to determine its permanence and its variants “à l'intérieur de l'espace littéraire” (p. 11). Very soon her research led her to face the problem of investigating the reality of the savage which she sees inextricably caught in the web of Christian thought and at the same time obscured by the myth of a world free of masters, priests, and laws, products of the disenchantment of civilized man with his own world. Initially she considers the “bon sauvage” within the parameters of his literary configuration, but then turns to explore the concept of the savage as “Other,” to denounce the ideological nature and function of the anthropology of the French Enlightenment, and to desacralize the myth of the philosophes' humanistic virtues.

Finally, in 1976, Ronald Meek's Social Science and the Ignoble Savage studies the four stages—hunting, pasturage, agriculture and commerce—in the development of society. The third chapter, “The French Pioneers of the 1750's,” deals with the writings of Turgot, Rousseau, Quesnay, Helvetius, and Goguet. What interests Meek in Rousseau is the evolution in his thinking from the Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité, published in 1755, to his little-known Essai sur l'origine des langues written between 1761 and 1763.

Each of the above books deals with the savage through its own particular bias. The most comprehensive study is undoubtedly Gilbert Chinard's. His erudition is staggering, which is perhaps the reason no one seems to have seriously challenged some of his interpretations—especially his enthusiastic conviction that we must see in Montaigne the defender of Indians, a man whose lips have tasted of “le lait de l'humaine tendresse” (p. 214), and whose words announce “les pages les plus hardies des philosophes du XVIII^e siècle” (p. 218).⁸

In the final chapter of La Légende du bon sauvage, René Gonnard capsulizes the history of the legend in the following manner: “Nous avons vu la légende du bon sauvage prendre naissance dans les récits des voyageurs et des explorateurs s'installer dans les traités des géographes, s'introduire ensuite dans la littérature et la philosophie, pénétrer enfin dans les systèmes d'économie sociale” (p. 111).⁹ Although Gonnard's and Meek's interest in the savage and his legend resides mainly in the role they play in the elaboration of the concept of social equality, both writers join Chinard in assigning two basic features to the world of the savage: natural goodness and the absence of private property. While upon the discovery of the New World, men living in “natural state” were first thought inferior for their ignorance of Christian beliefs, it would not be long before “libertins,” freethinkers in religious matters, would attack the European foundation of religious superiority. Soon the idea of natural goodness of Americans served to underline the vices of civilized Europe, and was itself confirmed in the absence of the concept of private property. Then the popularity of utopias encouraged their visionary builders to seize upon the legend and let their imagination supplant close study of reality.

René Gonnard defines the savage, beyond its etymological meaning of “silvaticus,” the man of the forest, mostly by opposing him to civilized man: “Le sauvage est l'homme qui vit d'une existence simplifiée, ignorante ou dédaigneuse de presque tout ce qui constitue la civilisation” (p. 12). The savage is, at the same time, better and happier than civilized man. He lives in a superior state because he lives according to the laws of nature.

The first travelers and missionaries to the New World had noted the existence in American natives of some virtues which had led them to equate the Indians with the Golden Race, long sung by Greek and Roman poets in their telling of the legend of the Golden Age. French missionaries, in particular, whose main goal was to Christianize the newly discovered peoples were happy to find them virtuous, when they had feared to find them damned without the light of Christian faith. Savages were also found to be intelligent, especially in Mexico and Peru where their magnificent civilizations astounded Europeans.

Another consideration enters into the appreciation of American natives. Hoxie Fairchild writes “the physical beauty of the Indians delights Columbus no less than their moral attractiveness” (p. 9).¹⁰ Chinard had already mentioned this strong aesthetic element which he explained as deeply rooted in folklore, to wit, that the body is the clothing of the soul. American Indians were described as naturally and extraordinarily beautiful. Their physical beauty had to be proof of their moral beauty. This conviction was so firmly rooted in travelers' minds that they scorned negroes as a perverse and inferior race, often referring to them as “ugly blackbirds” while they admired the splendid and graceful Indians. Fairchild reminds us that even Bartolomé de las Casas “did not hesitate to advocate the importation of negro slaves to lighten the burden of his beloved Caribbeans.” For Fairchild, the restriction of the term “Noble Savage” to the American Indian has no logical basis. Negroes, among other sorts of savages, should be able to qualify as “Noble Savages,” but he recognizes that only when the Romantic movement develops will negroes be granted, at least in English literature, the qualities and virtues until then reserved to American Indians. According to Fairchild “the Noble Savage is … originally a Carib and in the early stages of his development he owes much to his ‘beaux yeux’” (p. 10).

Gilbert Chinard tells us that the first Indians to be brought to France, in 1509, did not inspire much admiration. Seven of them had been captured by a seagoing captain and brought back to France, much as he had brought back some curious looking birds. Chinard quotes a description of the visiting Indians: “ils sont couleur de suie, leurs lèvres sont épaisses. … Leurs cheveux sont noirs et rudes comme du crin de cheval. Ils n'ont jamais de barbe et n'ont de poil ni sur le pubis, ni en aucune partie du corps” (L'Exotisme américain, p. 6). In spite of a less than glowing first impression, the American Indian soon becomes fashionable in France and in 1550, 1554, 1565, Indians participated in royal entries and other festivities. Chinard relates that in 1554, under Henry II, 300 naked Indians paraded in Rouen. It is said that the King had a good laugh at the spectacle, while the Queen did not seem at all shocked by the nakedness of so many men, fifty of whom were real Indians and the rest French sailors dressed or undressed as savages. It was also in Rouen in 1562, under Charles IX, that Montaigne had occasion to see and speak with one of three Indians who had come to pay their respects to the King of France. From that encounter between Montaigne and an Indian, in Fairchild's words “the Noble Savage … arrived in literature” (p. 21). In 1580 the first book of Montaigne's Essais was published and its thirty-first chapter is entitled “Des Cannibales.” In it, Montaigne writes of one of his manservants who had spent over ten years in a settlement established by French Protestants in a newly discovered country, Antarctic France, today's Brazil. From what he has been told Montaigne finds “qu'il n'y a rien de barbare et de sauvage en cette nation, … sinon que chacun appelle barbarie ce qui n'est pas de son usage.”¹¹ Montaigne adds that had Greek philosophers known or seen such countries they would have found them to exceed all the pictures with which poetry had embellished the descriptions of the Golden Age. After several observations about Indian practices and customs in fighting wars, Montaigne ends his essay by relating his meeting with the three savages who had been brought to Rouen in 1562. French ways had astounded them, especially the sight of overfed men while many others were starving, and they had found it strange that the needy people would not take the others by the throat and set fire to their houses.

Although Chinard believes that in “Des Cannibales,” probably written in the late 1570s, Montaigne systematically gives his contemporaries a lesson in morality and tolerance, he finds in “Des Coches” written in the mid-1580s a remarkable transformation in the essayist's mind on the subject of the New World's peoples. He sees in the latter essay a sort of “engagement” on Montaigne's part against the colonization of the New World, “devant certains crimes et devant certains spectacles il a senti battre son coeur et a courageusement crié son indignation” (L'Exotisme américain, p. 216). Chinard's enthusiasm appears to have kept him from an objective reading of the two essays. In “Des Cannibales” Montaigne, while describing the savage and his lifestyle, finds little practical or profitable reason to go in search of new worlds as “nous avons plus de curiosité que … de capacité” (p. 200)—capacity for developing such regions, we should read. In “Des Coches” Montaigne does not lament the conquest of Peru or Mexico. He only wishes that such a “noble conquête” had been accomplished by Alexander, or by Greeks or Romans, all so superior to bloodthirsty Spaniards.

Careful reading of not only “Des Cannibales” and of “Des Coches” but also of “De la Modération” which immediately precedes “Des Cannibales” confirms the difficulty of clearing up all ambiguity from Montaigne's writings, but they seem to be much less passionate on the subject of American natives than Chinard and others have felt. There appears to be no other link between the bloodthirsty savages in “De la Modération,” the contented natural men in “Des Cannibales,” and the Peruvian and Mexican kings in “Des Coches” than the fact that they all live in “ce monde-là,” the world over there.

Montaigne had read the travel books of his time, and by mentioning the Golden Age and Antiquity when he writes of Indians he discreetly espouses convictions and reflects attitudes of many of his contemporaries. That his essays are a deliberate expression of indignation, as Chinard would have it, is highly debatable. What is generally accepted is that Montaigne does introduce the American Indian into French literature, but, as René Gonnard reminds us after Gabriel Hanotaux, “sans y prendre garde” (p. 49). Ever enthusiastic Gilbert Chinard writes “il a fixé et pour longtemps … le type littéraire du sauvage américain” (p. 216). This time Chinard is right, but he should have written “les types littéraires” because it appears unquestionable that Indians in eighteenth-century fiction and drama in France follow the typecasting set in the two major essays of Montaigne. The few novels and plays which present American heroes and heroines offer natural men and women brought to Europe where they are subjected to incomprehensible customs and prejudices, or they dramatize the plight of the civilized Peruvians under the barbaric rule of Spaniards.

Before briefly studying such works, it should be mentioned that a third type of American appears in interminable adventure stories, to the probable delight of seekers of stronger emotions: the marauding Indian, burning, stealing, scalping, finally conquered by only one victor, firewater. That type is directly borrowed from travelers' relations: Lescarbot's Histoire de la Nouvelle-France, published in 1606; Lahontan's Nouveaux voyages in 1702, where Indian courtship rules are carefully explained and illustrated; Lafitau's Moeurs des sauvages américains in 1724, which seeks to prove that Indians are the descendants of Greeks. Jean-Bernard Bossu's Nouveaux voyages aux Indes occidentales published in 1768 adds little to the fund of knowledge about Indians according to contemporary opinion.

Alain-René Lesage, whose novel Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane and several tightly structured plays count among the best literary works of eighteenth-century France, published in 1732 Les Aventures de Monsieur … de Beauchêne. The novel is based on the adventures of one Robert de Beauchêne, French Canadian by birth, fierce savage by inclination. Born violent, the young boy has for playthings knives, arrows, swords, and assorted weapons which he uses to kill all dogs, cats, and pigs in the neighborhood. Only living among Iroquois, the most cruel and violent of Indians, will permit him to satisfy his love of killing and maiming. Iroquois violence during their habitual raids on Montreal is graphically described. When Robert manages to get himself kidnapped during one of the raids, he is adopted by an Iroquois woman, and he goes to live with his new people. A comical note: Robert is so cruelly evil that even the Iroquois are appalled and are often tempted to send him back to his real parents. We expect at this point to learn how Iroquois live, but the only Iroquois activities we are permitted to follow in detail are their warring practices. We find out that they love to attack but will run when attacked, that they drown in groups of seven or eight whenever a raiding party uses canoes, and that they easily get lost in the woods.

Eventually, running out of territory to burn and loot, Robert turns to the sea and finds himself in Santo Domingo, in a plantation where negro women vie with their white mistresses for their masters' favors. The only interest in that adventure is the number of times the words “monster” and “monstrous” are used to describe negroes. We leave Robert as he returns to his buccaneering activities.

While Lesage's novel represents a minor attempt to fictionalize material abundantly available in travel relations, the list of eighteenth-century French works of greater importance and worth which present on stage or in novels characters of American birth is woefully limited. Two revive the theme of the destruction of the kingdom of Peru by fanatic Spanish invaders: Voltaire's play Alzire in 1736 and Marmontel's Les Incas in 1777. Nothing in Alzire recalls a Peruvian background. The Peruvians in the play could be any people fighting for freedom. Even the name of the heroine, Alzire, it has been said, sounds more Arabic than Inca. The plot is trivial and its development without surprise or suspense. The new Spanish governor, Guzman, is the arrogant son of the kind, Inca-loving former governor, Alvarez. Guzman speaks of breaking the will of the fierce Americans who behave as savage monsters, while his father laments the implacable destruction of the Inca civilization which has already begun. A timid Inca maiden, Alzire, and her renegade Inca lover, Zamore, complete the cast. Guzman wants to marry Alzire in spite of her “coeur sauvage.” By Act 3 the wedding is to take place, and Zamore and his followers are about to attack. When they do, they suffer defeat but not before Guzman is mortally wounded. Zamore is sentenced to die and only if he converts to Catholicism will he be spared. As he hesitates, Guzman who is dying forgives everyone. His last words befit him:

Américains, qui fûtes mes victimes,
Songez que ma clémence a surpassé mes crimes.
Instruisez l'Amérique, apprenez à ses rois
Que les chrétiens sont nés pour leur donner des lois.(12)

The curtain falls as Zamore, overwhelmed by emotion, cries out his love and admiration for Guzman.

Marmontel's Les Incas was written, he tells his readers, in the hope of establishing a clear distinction between fanaticism and true religion. Somehow, in spite of the description of Inca festivities in honor of the Sun, the arrival of Mexicans fleeing conquering Spaniards, Pizarro's inability to control the rapacity of his officers, the hatred between the two sons of the late Emperor of Peru, the eruption of a volcano, the doomed love story of a young Spaniard and an Inca virgin, Marmontel's work remains without dramatic force. We are not convinced that Marmontel's Spaniards are fanatics who kill Indians in the name of religion. Gold and riches seem more the reason for the killings, even if the novel's last sentence reads “Et le Fanatisme, entouré de massacres et de débris, assis sur des monceaux de morts, promenant ses regards sur de vastes ruines, s'applaudit, et loua le ciel d'avoir couronné ses travaux.”

Less ponderous are the works presenting Northern American natives. In 1721 La Drevetière de Lisle gave a play, Arlequin sauvage, which in its English translation of 1758 received the title Tombo-Chiqui, much more exotic sounding than Arlequin, with the subtitle The American Savage. The character is a fusion of two traditions, the literary tradition which allows the use of a foreigner to criticize customs and institutions, and the theatrical tradition of the Arlequin character. Tombo-Chiqui has arrived from his native land with his master, Clérimond, who has carefully kept the American ignorant of European manners. As Tombo-Chiqui is perceptive and shrewd, Clérimond promises himself much amusement at the expense of his servant in his new environment.

The subplot involves the postponed betrothal of the same Clérimond to his beloved Silvia, now promised to Mirabel. The outcome of this “pas de trois” is never in doubt, so we can give all our attention to Tombo-Chiqui, who is on a collision course with almost everyone he meets. “Sauvages insolents,” he calls them, as he mocks the French and their clothes, and supposes that those who travel in carriages must all have broken legs. Clérimond's fun has begun. He informs Tombo-Chiqui that what makes people civilized is their need for laws to be wise and honest, which seems to the American proof that all around him are knaves if they need laws to be honest. From an encounter when he wants to make love rather than talk about it, to his troubles with a peddler who expects payment for goods which Tombo-Chiqui thought were his for the taking, to the upsetting discovery of arrogant wealth callously flaunted before abject poverty, Clérimond's servant gets an education in the customs and manners of “civilized” men. He will return to his country, he says, where he will once more be his own king, master and servant, but love will keep him from returning to the land where one needs no money to be happy, no laws to be wise. He will remain in the employ and care of Clérimond who has, all along, been vastly amused by Tombo-Chiqui's misadventures. Thus continues to prevail white man's paternalism towards the “savage.”

Chamford's La jeune Indienne, a slight comedy in both length and substance, was first produced in 1764. The play may have been a success or a total failure depending on whose review of the time one reads. In any case, its success would not have been due to the presence of an Indian on stage, even an Indian maiden, but rather to the fact that the one-act play is a “drame bourgeois” in miniature, and that its real hero is a favorite of French anglophiles, the Quaker Mowbray. Neither the young Englishman Belton, nor the Indian heroine with the unlikely name of Betti are particularly appealing characters, while Mowbray is portrayed with the traits of a conventionally wise and loving father-figure. It is Mowbray whose daughter Belton wants to marry to gain social status and money, who finally arranges for Betti to become Belton's wife. He has seen Betti's grief before the younger man's apparent disloyalty and touched by it, he brings, as expected, the play to its righteous and moral conclusion.

What is strikingly similar in the works which have been discussed is the lack of individuality, the absence of personal characteristics in the Indians portrayed. Alzire in Voltaire's play, Cora in Marmontel's novel, Tombo-Chiqui who is more Arlequin than American, or Betti who yearns to be back in her dark cave in the thick of her forest but knows the value of a signed marriage contract—all are two-dimensional marionettes with no particular life of their own. What happens to them does not evolve from any specific delineation of Indian character or psychology. Their expressions of love or suffering bear no idiomatic Indian imprint, and a change in the origins of the American hero or heroine would not create the need to recast the character. As we get to know those Indians so briefly and so superficially, it is impossible to label them “noble” or “bons.” Their contribution as “savages” to the unfolding of the plot, and to the development of relationships between characters is too slight to sustain an in-depth study. We can then perhaps divest the notion of the “savage” in eighteenth-century French fiction and drama of the overlay of philosophical trappings and view him as a faintly picturesque example of the diversity of characters which French writers of the times created for the enjoyment of their public.

Are we to conclude that there is not one “noble” or “bon” savage in eighteenth-century French literature? There is one, but few readers have met him or heard of him: Kador in Florello, a novel by Loaisel de Tréogate, published in 1776. The influence of Prevost, Baculard d' Arnaud, and Richardson is undeniable in the novel, but it is impossible to state precisely where Tréogate had found the inspiration for the creation of such a character. Tréogate, by profession a soldier in the King's Guard, devoted to literature when not on duty, had already written several works, most of them ignored or ridiculed by critics past and present. Reading the novel today affects one rather curiously, as, setting chronology aside, one would seem to be reading a blurry imitation of Chateaubriand's Atala, which was not published until 1801, twenty-five years after Florello.

After a shipwreck, Florello, who is fleeing the civilized world, finds himself on an island where Nature has laid out all its marvels. The beautiful Orenoco river, majestically winding its course through the green valley, serves as setting for the unfolding of Florello's story. An old man, Kador, welcomes him. To console the despairing young man, Kador leads him to admire the beauty of his enchanting valley. He advises him to forget the past and his old destructive passions. The study of nature will cure his moral sickness. The old Indian teaches his European guest the workings of the universe by contemplating the stars and many other manifestations of the greatness of the Supreme Being. Florello soon finds happiness in the peace and splendor of the island, while Kador wants him to remember that humanity will forever remain suspended between light and darkness.

When Kador offers shelter to Florello and helps him overcome the despair caused by what Kador calls “le mal moral de la civilisation,”¹³ he is indeed a Noble Savage, a free being embodying wisdom, great and true humanity, virtues which he has drawn directly from nature. The story of Florello does not need to be told. Loaisel de Tréogate was undoubtedly a writer of limited talent, and it is regrettable that his mediocre skills have denied Kador an honorable ranking among fictional American natives, but, at the end of the eighteenth century, somehow Loaisel de Tréogate appears to have glimpsed the aesthetic and psychological wealth offered by the artistic representation of the Savage at his Noble best. However, only Chateaubriand's Atala, the jewel of pre-Romantic literature, will blend landscapes, adventures, and emotions through the artistry and lyricism of the writer we call “l'Enchanteur,” the Sorcerer, to fashion the Savage into a sensitive and poignant human being for the enjoyment and the edification of the readers of the early nineteenth century.

Notes

1. The Writings of Voltaire (New York: Wm. H. Wise, 1931), p. 123.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid., p. 66.

4. Ibid., p. 162.

5. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Paul and Virginia (Boston: Estes and Lauriat, n.d.), p. 186.

6. A. O. Lovejoy, “The Supposed Primitivism of Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality,” Modern Philology 21 (1923): 169.

7. “Le sauvage de Rousseau n'est qu'une abstraction, sa bonté purement négative est celle d'un être isolé, situé dans un temps antérieur à l'existence des sociétés.” Michèle Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des lumières (Paris: Flammarion, 1977), p. 169.

8. Gilbert Chinard, L'Exotisme américaine dans la littérature française au XVI^e siècle.

9. René Gonnard, La Légende du bon sauvage.

10. Hoxie Neal Fairchild, The Noble Savage, A Study in Romantic Naturalism in English Literature.

11. Montaigne, Essais (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1967), p. 203.

12. Voltaire, Alzire.

13. Loaisel de Tréogate, Florello.