JAMES

See also:

• JAMES DARMESTETER (1849-1894)

DARMESTETER (1849-1894)  , French author and antiquarian, was born of Jewish parents on the 28th of March 1849 at Chateau Salins, in Alsace . The family name had originated in their earlier home of Darmstadt . He was educated in Paris, where, under the guidance of Michel Breal and Abel Bergaigne, he imbibed a love for Oriental studies, to which for a time he entirely devoted himself . He was a man of vast intellectual range . In 1875 he published a thesis on the mythology of the Zend Avesta, and in 1877 became teacher of Zend at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes . He followed up his researches with his Etudes iraniennes (1883), and ten years later published a complete translation of the Zend Avesta, with historical and philological commentary (3 vols., 1892-1893), in the Annales du music . Guimet . He also edited the Zend Avesta for Max Muller's Sacred Books of the East . Darmesteter regarded the extant texts as far more recent than was commonly believed, placing the earliest in the 1st century B.C., and the bulk in the 3rd century A.D . In 1885 he was appointed professor in the College de France, and was sent to India in 1886 on a mission to collect the popular songs of the Afghans, a translation of which, with a valuable essay on the Afghan language and literature, he published on his return . His impressions of English dominion in India were conveyed in Lettres sur l'Inde (1888) . England interested him deeply; and his attachment to the gifted English writer, A .

Mary F . Robinson, whom he shortly afterwards married (and who in 190I became the wife of Professor E . Duclaux, director of the Pasteur Institute at Paris), led him to translate her poems into French in 1888 . Two years after his death a collection of excellent essays on English subjects was published in English . He also wrote Le Mandi depuis les origins de l'Islam jusqu'd nos jours (1885) ; Les Origines de la poesie persane (1888); Prophetes d'Israel (1892), and other books on topics connected with the east, and from 1883 onwards drew up the annual reports of the Societe Asiatique . 'He had just become connected with the Revue de Paris, when his delicate constitution succumbed to a slight attack of illness on the lgth of October 1894 . His elder brother, ARSENE DARMESTETER (1846-1888), was a distinguished philologist and man of letters . He studied under Gaston Paris at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, and became professor of Old French language and literature at the Sorbonne . His Life of Words appeared in English in 1888 . He also collaborated with Adolphe Hatzfeld in a Dictionnaire general de la langue francaise (2 vols., 1895-1900) . Among his most important work was the elucidation of Old French by means of the many glosses in the medieval writings of Rashi and other French Jews . His scattered papers on romance and Jewish philology were collected by James Darmesteter as Arsene Darmesteter, reliques scientifiques (2 vols., 1890) .

His valuable Cours de grammaire historique de In langue francaise was edited after his death by E . Muret and L . Sudre (1891-1895; English edition, 1902) . There is an eloge of James Darmesteter in the

Journal asiatique (1894, vol. iv. pp . 519-534), and a notice by Henri Cordier, with a list of his writings, in The Royal Asiatic Society's Journal (January 1895) ; see also Gaston Paris, " James Darmesteter," in Penseurs et pates (1896), pp . 1-61) .