Jacques-Henri Bernardin 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. ==Legacy==

:"Barye's predators devouring their living prey indulge the emotions in a Romantic way of course, but they also embody a romantically moralizing point of view like those held by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Mme de Staël, and Victor Hugo. The Oeuvres complètes of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre appeared in Paris in 1834 and was surely known to Barye, for the author was the former director of the zoo in the Jardin des Plantes and one of the "masters of genuine poetry" for the arch-romantic Mme de Staël. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre maintained that a carnivorous animal in devouring its prey alive committed a sin against the laws of its own nature." 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) ==See also==