Bernardin de Saint-Pierre is for most people the author of one book: Paul et Virginie. This new edition of his play Empsael et Zoraide, presented in a modernised spelling, makes available a considerably more muscular text which illustrates his abolitionist stance through its central irony: the masters are black and their slaves white, joining forces in the antislavery debate which reached its height with the French Revolution. Bernardin thus introduces into it a rare element of humour which, had his play ever been performed, would have made his audiences sit up and think. This...