the participants at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1920 considered the status of Mauritius, the New York Times headlined its coverage: Literary references and adaptations The novel served as the basis for a hugely successful opera of the same name, composed by Jean-François Le Sueur, which premiered at the Théâtre Feydeau in Paris on 13 January 1794. In Le Curé de village (The country parson; 1839), Honoré de Balzac described how "the revelation of love came through a charming book from the hand of a genius" and then more clearly identified the work: "sweet fancies of love derived from Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's book". Gustave Flaubert in Madame Bovary (1856) described how Emma's experience of literature formed her imagination: "She had read Paul et Virginie, and she had fantasized about the little bamboo cottage, the Negro Domingo, the dog Fidèle, but even more the sweet friendship of some good little brother who would go and gather ripe fruits for you from great trees taller than spires, or who would run barefoot in the sand, bringing you a bird's nest." In Un Cœur simple (A Simple Heart; 1877), he used the names Paul and Virginie for the two children of Madame Aubain, Félicité's employer. In Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens, Flora Finching, the former fiancée of protagonist Arthur Clennam, reminds him how after their parents had forced them apart, he had returned a copy of Paul and Virginia to her "without note or comment." The rough parallel between their failed engagement and the tragic history of Paul and Virginia isn't explicated, but would have been obvious to Finching and Clennam. The novel inspired, and served as title for, a duet for clarinet and violin with piano accompaniment by Amilcare Ponchielli, which was published in 1857. Victor Massé wrote a very successful opera on the subject, again titled Paul and Virginie, in 1876. The English author William Hurrell Mallock titled his 1878 satirical novel The New Paul and Virginia, or Positivism on an Island (1878) after Bernadin de Saint-Pierre's work. Guy de Maupassant in Bel Ami (1885) described a desolate room with minimal furnishings that include "two coloured pictures representing Paul and Virginie". The novel The Blue Lagoon (1908) was inspired by Paul et Virginie. It served as the basis for an American short silent film Paul and Virginia in 1910. In Women in Love (1920) by D. H. Lawrence, Birkin makes reference