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Born on 13 January 1773, in the early days of the political upheaval that would go on to shake Europe, Chézy’s education was initially in the sciences. His father, Antoine Chézy (1718-1798), was an engineer and director of the École des Ponts et Chaussées, famed for having built the Pont de Neuilly bridge. However, as a lover of languages and poetry, the young Chézy abandoned his preordained career path and instead devoted himself to studying Arabic and Persian, along with a number of European languages in the form of German, English, Italian and Latin. Taking advantage of the opening of the École des Langues Orientales in 1795, he studied Arabic under Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy and Persian under Louis-Mathieu Langlès. His language skills saw him chosen as one of the scholars sent to accompany Napoleon on his Expedition to Egypt in 1798. A person of generally poor health, Chézy fell ill in Toulon and was forced to withdraw from this military and scientific adventure – marking a key turning point in the history of knowledge about the ‘Orient’.
In 1800, Chézy was appointed as an ‘employee’ at the Bibliothèque Nationale, responsible for handling the non-European collections. His first focus was on Persian poetry, publishing a translation of Layla and Majnun by the famous Iranian poet Jami (1807-1492), before turning his attention to the Sanskrit language and its rich body of literature. He learned this scholarly language using the grammar written in Latin by Father Jean-François Pons in 1730, preserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale(Sanscrit 551). Setting about reading the Rāmāyaṇa, he published a translation of the Yadjnadatta-badha, ou la Mort d'Yadjnadatta, an episode attributed to the famous epic by legendary poet Vālmīki. This work thrust Chézy into the study of Sanskrit and saw him gain a reputation as one of the only people in France to be familiar with the language. During the time of the First Restoration, Louis XVIII, on the advice of Sacy and Langlès, established chairs for Sanskrit and Chinese at the Collège de France in 1814. On 16th January 1815, Chézy delivered his Discours d'ouverture du cours de langue et de littérature sanskrite speech to mark the opening of the Sanskrit literature and language course, the first of its kind in Europe. Among his audience was Latin scholar Jean-Louis Burnouf, father of Eugène Burnouf, his successor at the Collège de France, who instigated the republishing of the work dedicated to the Yajńadattabada in a revised edition that also included a Latin translation. Eugène Burnouf was also a student of this course, as evidenced by his notes taken in the ‘Cours de Chézy’ between 1822 and 1824. This document serves as a precious record of the method used to teach Sanskrit, written in Bengali characters, and the texts studied, namely the Mānava-dharma-śāstra or ‘The Code of Manu’, a normative text of tremendous importance for understanding the structure of Indian society.
An avid poetry enthusiast who fervently embraced the thriving Romanticist movement at the time, Chézy was branded a ‘fleuriste’ (a name given to French orientalists who studied texts with a more aesthetical than philological approach, in ironic reference to Fleurs de l’Inde by Guerrier de Dumast (1796-1883)) by Jules Mohl, himself a follower of scientific philology, in what was a famous quarrel within the ranks of the Société Asiatique, established in 1822. While Chézy’s translations involved a lot of creative licence, they were still the first to emerge in this field. In 1817, Chézy had published an Analyse du Mégha-Doûtah, or an analysis of The Cloud Messenger Sanskrit poem by Kālidāsa. Further underlining the importance of metrics in Sanskrit literary compositions, he published a Théorie du Sloka, ou Mètre héroïque sanskrit (Theory of the Sloka, or Heroic Sanskrit Metre) in 1827, describing three types of metres, including the 32-syllable śloka most commonly used by the Indian poets. His most acclaimed work continues to beLa reconnaissance de Sacountala (The Recognition of Shakuntala), a Sanskrit and Prakrit drama by Kālidāsa, published in 1830, ‘for the first time, in original, based on a unique manuscript in the King’s Library, accompanied by a French translation.’ And Chézy’s edition is indeed based on a manuscript sourced in Bengal by Father Pons, dating back to 1653 and preserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale (Sanscrit 657). It was a translation that put India in the same league as French artists and writers. In 1858, Théophile Gauthier penned the book Sacountala, a ballet-pantomime production choreographed by Lucien Petitpa.
The cholera epidemic of 1832 saw France lose a number of orientalists, including Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion. Chézy himself died on 31 August. He was survived by his wife Helmina von Chézy, née von Klencke, a German writer involved in Europe’s intellectual and arts scene in the first half of the 19th century. During the sale of Chézy’s library, Helmina, who was separated from Chézy, wrote the Notice sur la vie et les ouvrages de M. de Chézy (Notice on the life and works of M. de Chézy), an ode to the scholar’s pioneering days.
Written in july 2024
