Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre

Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (; also called Bernardin de St. Pierre) (19 January 1737, in Le Havre – 21 January 1814, in Éragny, Val-d'Oise) was a French writer and botanist. He is best known for his 1788 novel, Paul et Virginie, a very popular 18th-century classic of French literature.

Biography Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's younger sister was Catherine Dorothée de Saint-Pierre. At the age of twelve he had read Robinson Crusoe and went with his uncle, a skipper, to the West-Indies. After returning from this trip he was educated as an engineer at the École des Ponts. Then he joined the French Army and was involved in the Seven Years' War against Prussia and England, but was dismissed for insubordination. After travels around Europe he returned to Paris in 1765.

He received a small inheritance on his father's death,

In 1792 he married a very young girl, Félicité Didot, who brought him a considerable dowry. After his first wife's death he married in 1800, when he was sixty-three, another young girl, Desirée Pelleport. Monument to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre at the Jardin des plantes in Paris. Alexander von Humboldt, next to Charles Darwin the best known naturalist of the nineteenth century, belonged to the admirers of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and cherished the novel Paul et Virginie.

Works Voyage à l’Île de France, à l’île Bourbon et au cap de Bonne-Espérance (1773) L’Arcadie (1781) Études de la nature (1784) Paul et Virginie (1788) La Chaumière indienne (1790) Le Café de Surate (1790) Les Vœux d’un solitaire (1790) De la nature de la morale (1798) Voyage en Silésie (1807) La Mort de Socrate (1808) Harmonies de la nature (1815)