Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué

Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué was a Prussian cavalry officer of Huguenot descent who fought Napoleon and wrote German Romanticism's most enduring fairy tale, Undine — the water spirit who marries a knight to gain a soul. His chivalric romances made him famous in the 1810s and unfashionable by the 1820s, but Undine outlived the fashion and reached Hoffmann, Tchaikovsky and Giraudoux.