SAINT-PIERRE, JACQUES-HENRI-BERNARDIN de.
French writer, b. at Le Havre on 19 Jan. 1737, d. at Éragny on 21 Jan. 1814.
He pursued mathematical studies and, while still an adolescent, traveled to Martinique, then to Russia, Poland, Austria, and Germany, either as a military engineer or living by expedients. The protection of the Baron de Breteuil secured him a post on the island of Mauritius, which he soon had to relinquish and about which he later wrote in *Voyage à l'île-de-France* (1773). In Paris, he achieved far greater success with *Études de la nature* (1784), followed by *Vœux d'un solitaire* (1789), *La Chaumière indienne* (1790), and above all the poignant novel *Paul et Virginie* (1798), a work born of his exotic experiences and recounted with extraordinary vividness and freshness.
Director of the botanical garden and, after the Revolution, professor of moral philosophy at the École normale and member of the Institut, he published the treatises *De la nature* and *De la morale* (1798), in which he set forth a humanitarian and naturalistic conception of ethics derived from Rousseau, marked by unmistakable anticlerical polemics.