Born in Paris on August 8, 1801, the youngest of four sons of Venceslas and Rose Laisné Jacquemont, Victor Jacquemont became one of the rising stars of French natural history and an archetype for the scientist in the Romantic era. Combining youth, genius, and a rhapsodic love of nature with a life filled with masculine affection, star-crossed romance, and exotic climes, Jacquemont epitomized the romantic intellectual right up to the time of his untimely death in the Himalayas. In a career in which ill fortune and good fortune walked hand in hand, the figure of Jacquemont has all but overshadowed his substantial scientific accomplishments. The surviving correspondence of the ill-starred French botanist, Victor Jacquemont and his friend, Pierre Achille Marie Chaper (1795-1874) consists of 106 letters pertaining to the development of Jacquemont's scientific career and their personal and social commitments. The correspondence was published, though not translated, in James F. Marshall, Victor Jacquemont Letters to Achille Chaper: Intimate Sketches of Life Among Stendhal's Coterie (Philadelphia: APS, 1960), APS Memoir 50.