Antoine-Léonard de Chézy

Antoine-Léonard de Chézy (15 January 1773 – 31 August 1832) was a French orientalist and one of the first European scholars of Sanskrit.

His father, Antoine de Chézy (1718–1798), was an engineer who finally became director of the École des Ponts et Chaussées.

The son was intended for his father's profession; but in 1799 he obtained a post in the oriental manuscripts department of the national library.

[1] In about 1803, he began studying Sanskrit, and although he possessed no grammar or dictionary, he succeeded in acquiring sufficient knowledge of the language to be able to compose poetry in it.

[2] In Paris sometime between 1800 and 1805, Friedrich Schlegel's wife Dorothea introduced him to the Wilhelmine Christiane von Klencke, called Hermina or Hermine, who, extremely unusually for the time, was a very young divorcée who had come to Paris to be a correspondent for German newspapers.