Saint-Pierre, JACQUES-HENRI BERNARDIN DE, the author of Paul and Virginia, was born at Havre, 19th January 1737. His parents were amiable but foolish people with absurd pretensions to family, and the education of the abnormally imaginative boy was ill regulated from the beginning. He found his ideals in the Lives of the Saints and Robinson Crusoe, made a voyage to Martinique in one of his uncle's ships, and returned to pursue irregular studies at Caen and Rouen. He dreamed of a missionary's life, but was sent to Paris to become an engineer, and found himself at twenty-three on his father's second marriage compelled to shift for himself. He served some time in the Engineers, but quarrelled with his chiefs and was dismissed, and next year was sent to Malta only to suffer the same experience. His head was turned by the writings of Rousseau, and he made public employment impossible for him by the innumerable utopian memoirs and criticisms on matters of administration with which he deluged the bureaux of the ministers. Buoyed up by dreams of a new state to be founded on the shores of the Sea of Aral, he travelled on nothing to Russia, and returned in dejection to Warsaw, where in his three months' stay occurred the romance which grew into that legend of the love of a princess which he ended by believing in himself. Next followed further wanderings to Vienna, Dresden, and Berlin, and a government expedition to Madagascar, which he abandoned at the Île de France, to spend there almost three years of melancholy and observation. In June 1771 he returned to Paris, his head full of ideas, yet he hesitated awhile before he recognised his true vocation. His Voyage à l'Île de France appeared early in 1773, and at first attracted little attention. Yet it gave a distinctly new element to literature in that close portraiture of nature—that apprehension of the mysterious correspondence between the spectacle and the spectator, which nowadays adds the personal accent to descriptions of landscape. As he himself said of the contemporary descriptions, 'la physionomie n'y est pas, and indeed even Rousseau's Confessions and Rêveries (both later) give us sensations rather than images.
A close friend of Rousseau in his last years, Saint-Pierre became misanthropic and half-crazy through poverty and lack of sympathy, and wearied out his few friends with his importunities. His Études de la Nature (3 vols. 1784) showed the strong influence of Rousseau in its sentimentalism, its inspired folly, and the ridiculous length to which it carries the use of final causes. He proves the existence of God from poetic reasons; everything in nature points to Him, for God made nature for man, and man for Himself. Nature makes men good; society corrupts them—'plus la société est policée, plus les niaux y sont multipliés et cruels.' Hence the value of ignorance—the mother of all mystery—especially to women. In his Elysium are no capitalists nor nobles, but monuments to the inventors of useful arts, and such especial benefactors of the race as Nicot, who introduced tobacco into Europe. Not to speak of more essential faults, the book contains much wild physical science, as his theories of the tides and elongation of the poles. The new work was received with immense applause, and a fourth volume followed in 1788, containing the immortal Paul et Virginie, its author's one work of genius. Humboldt owns the wonderful truth with which it realises the splendours of tropical vegetation, but it is as an exquisite idyll of love growing up unconsciously in two natural hearts that the book possesses a perennial charm even for such critics as Sainte-Beuve and Gautier. Daphnis and Chloe suggested the idea of the change from friendship into love, but individual genius alone wrought the peculiar spell which carried Paul and Virginia quickly across Europe in English, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Polish, and Spanish translations, and which made Napoleon take it with him in his Italian campaign, and re-read it at St Helena. Yet the story has many faults besides its overstrained sentimentality—it is sadly marred by its didactic passages, and indeed the whole is but an object-lesson to the Études. His next works were Vœux d'un Solitaire (1789) and the weaker novel, La Chaumière Indienne (1791).
At fifty-five Saint-Pierre married the daughter of his printer, a girl of twenty, and at sixty-three he married another young girl, who after his death became the wife of Aimé Martin, his enthusiastic biographer and editor. A member of the Institute from its foundation in 1795, he was admitted to the Academy on its revival in 1803, but he made himself ridiculous by childish quarrels with his fellow-members. Napoleon heaped favours upon him, and he lived comfortably amid his flowers till his death in his country-house at Eragny, near Pontoise, 21st January 1814.
Saint-Pierre wrote down to the last, yet did not succeed in destroying his reputation. His Harmonies de la Nature (3 vols. 1796) was but a pale repetition of the Études. Besides these the Le Café de Surate and the Essai sur J.-J. Rousseau alone deserve to be named. His name survives only in his one masterpiece, but his influence remains entire in the greater Chateaubriand and Lamartine.
His Œuvres Complètes by Aimé Martin fill 12 volumes (1813-20); the Correspondance, 4 volumes (1826). His great Biography by the same editor appeared in 1820; its extravagances may be corrected by Arvède Barine's clever study (1891) in Les Grands Écrivains Français. There are also books by Fleury (1844) and Prévost-Paradol (1852).