Nicolas Pépin belonged to the Franco-African merchant elite of Gorée, off Dakar. He was a son of the signare Catherine Baudet and a brother of Anne Pépin, the companion of the Chevalier de Boufflers, governor of Senegal in 1785–87. Signares were African and mixed-race women traders who married or partnered with European merchants, held property in their own names, and dealt in slaves; the Pépins owned ships and took part in the Atlantic trade. Pépin is not an architect in any professional sense — he is the man named in the record as having had the house on rue Saint-Germain built, in about 1776–1786, in the two-storey Gorée merchant type with living quarters above and holding cells below. The building is now a UNESCO-listed memorial museum.
