Friedrich de La Motte-Fouqué

Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué (1777–1843) was a German Romantic writer, born in Brandenburg an der Havel to a family of Huguenot descent whose grandfather had been a general under Frederick the Great. He served as a Prussian cavalry officer, left the army after an injury, studied under August Wilhelm Schlegel and fought again against Napoleon in 1813. He wrote a great quantity of verse, plays and chivalric romances that quickly went out of fashion, but Undine (1811), the tale of a water spirit who marries a knight to gain a soul, has outlived everything else he wrote and inspired operas by E. T. A. Hoffmann, Lortzing and Tchaikovsky.