SAINT-PIERRE, BERNARDIN DE , French man of letters, was born at Havre on Jan. 19, 1737. He was edu cated at Caen and at Rouen, and became an engineer. According to his own account he served in the army, taking part in the Hesse campaign of 1760, but was dismissed for insubordination, and, after quarrelling with his family, was in some difficulty. He ap peared at Malta, St. Petersburg, Warsaw, Dresden, Berlin, holding brief commissions as an engineer and rejoicing in romantic ad ventures. He came back to Paris in 1765 poorer than he set out. He came into possession of a small sum at his father's death, and in 1768 he set out for the Isle of France (Mauritius) with a gov ernment commission, and remained there three years, returning home in 1771. On his return from Mauritius he was introduced to D'Alembert and his friends, but he was most attracted to J. J. Rousseau, of whom in bis last years he saw much, and on whom he formed both his character and his style. His Voyage a Vile de France (2 vols., 1773) gained him a reputation as a champion of innocence and religion, and in consequence, through the exer tions of the bishop of Aix, a pension of i,000 livres a year. The Etudes de la nature (3 vols., 1784) was an attempt to prove the existence of God from the wonders of nature.
young girl, Felicite Didot, who brought him a considerable dowry. For a short time in 1792 he was superintendent of the Jardin des Plantes, and on the suppression of the office received a pension of 3,000 livres. In 1795 he became a member of the Institute. After his first wife's death he married in 180o, when he was sixty-three, another young girl, Desiree Pelleport, and is said to have been very happy with her. On Jan. 21, 1814 he died at his house at Eragny, near Pontoise.
Paul et Virginie has been pronounced gaudy in style and un healthy in tone. Bernardin's merit lies in his breaking away from the arid vocabulary which more than a century of classical writing had brought upon France, in his genuine preference for the beauties of nature, and in his attempt to describe them faithfully. After Rousseau, and even more than Rousseau, Bernardin was in French literature the apostle of the return to nature, though both in him and his immediate follower Chateaubriand there is still much mannerism and unreality.
Aime Martin, disciple of Bernardin and the second husband of his second wife, published a complete edition of his works in 18 volumes (1818-2o), afterwards increased by seven volumes of correspondence and memoirs (1826). Paul et Virginie, the Chaumiere indienne, etc. have often been separately reprinted. See also Arvede Barin's Bernardin de Saint Pierre (1891) .