United States or Slovakia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In 1754 a young man, twenty years old, Anquetil Duperron, a scholar of the École des Langues Orientales in Paris, happened to see a fac-simile of four leaves of the Oxford Vendîdâd, which had been sent from England, a few years before, to Etienne Fourmont, the Orientalist. He determined at once to give to France both the books of Zoroaster and the first European translation of them.
Emerson, in his lecture on heroism, has signalled especially the heroism of the scholar, and selected as an example the Frenchman Anquetil Duperron, who worked his passage on a vessel to India, and then worked his way, mostly on foot, through Afghanistan and Persia, learning languages as he went, in order to obtain copies of the sacred books of the Persians, which were then unknown in Europe.
An old man could remember having heard it called, in the last century, the hotel Duperron, so it seemed probable that the illustrious Cardinal of that name had built, or perhaps merely lived in it.
La Pierre philosophale des dames, ou les Caprices de l'amour et du destin, by Louis Adrien Duperron de Castera, , 12mo. I have not seen a copy of the book. Mrs. E. Griffith's comment on the work is typical of the tendency to moralize even the amusements of the day. See A Collection of Novels, , II, 162.
His untiring devotion to the interests of France was ultimately recognized by his elevation to the dignity of minister under Henri IV. It was Duperron who obtained from the Pope the removal of the interdict fulminated against France. He ultimately became a cardinal, and Archbishop of Sens, and died in 1606.
He sustained against Duperron, Bishop of Evreux, the famous conference of Fontainebleau, at whose close each of the two parties claimed the victory. Louis XIII deprived him of his government of Saumur; and he died in 1623. Mézeray, vol. x. pp. 254, 255. Bonnechose, Hist. de France, vol. i. p. 438, seventh edition. Bonnechose, vol. i. p. 438.
It remained for Anquetil Duperron, a young Frenchman, a Persian scholar, to translate the Zend Avesta, which contains the teachings of Zoroaster, and may be called the Parsee bible. And even now the highest authority in Parsee theology and literature is Professor Jackson, who holds the chair of oriental languages in Columbia University, New York.
Mush-rooms selected by myself! "'Oh! your Excellency, the idea! Why, I would eat them with my eyes closed. "I leave it to you, if that wasn't great luck for the poor Nabob, the first time that he ate a meal with us. Duperron, who was waiting opposite him, told us about it in the butler's pantry.
Ably, indeed, through the agency of Miron, did they persist in defending the royal prerogative, and demand that a principle should be established forbidding the deposition of their sovereigns on accusations of heresy; expressing their desire that the Crown should be recognized by law as completely independent of spiritual power; and although the clergy, through Cardinal Duperron, formally and strenuously opposed these propositions, so little was Miron affected by the adverse circumstances under which he appeared, that he replied with a logic and energy which compelled the States to defer their decision until the following year.
He modestly himself says he has enlarged on the plan of Mason's Life of Gray; but his merits are his own. For the history of the period it is, as Cardinal Duperron said of Rabelais, le livre the book 'in worth as a book, decides Carlyle, 'beyond any other production of the eighteenth century. Time has dealt gently with both Johnson and Boswell.
Word Of The Day