SAINT-PIERRE, JACQUES-HENRI-BERNARDIN de. - French writer, born at Le Havre on 19 Jan. 1737, died at Eragny on 21 Jan. 1814.
He pursued mathematical studies and travelled, while still an adolescent, to Martinique, then to Russia, Poland, Austria, and Germany, as an engineer officer or by living by his wits; the protection of Baron de Breteuil secured him an appointment on the island of Mauritius, which he soon had to relinquish and of which he gave an account in the Voyage à l'île-de-France (1773). In Paris he achieved much wider success with the Etudes de la nature (1784), followed by the Voeux d'un solitaire (1789), La Chaumière indienne (1790), and above all the pathetic novel Paul et Virginie (1798), the fruit of his exotic experience, relived with extraordinary vividness and freshness.
Director of the botanical garden and, after the Revolution, professor of morals at the Ecole normale and member of the Institut, he published the treatises De la nature and De la morale (1798), setting forth the humanitarian and natural conception of ethics that he had learned from Rousseau, in the service of an undisguised anticlerical polemic.