James Darmesteter

He was educated in Paris, where, under the guidance of Michel Bréal and Abel Bergaigne, he imbibed a love for Oriental studies, to which for a time he entirely devoted himself.

England interested him deeply; and his attachment to the gifted English writer, Agnes Mary Frances Robinson, whom he shortly afterwards married (and who in 1901 became the wife of Professor E. Duclaux, director of the Pasteur Institute at Paris), led him to translate her poems into French in 1888.

He also wrote Le Mahdi depuis les origines de l'Islam jusqu'a nos jours (1885); Les Origines de la poesie persane (1888); Prophètes d'Israel (1892), and other books on topics connected with the East, and from 1883 onwards drew up the annual reports of the Société Asiatique.

He had just become connected with the Revue de Paris, when his delicate constitution succumbed to a slight attack of illness on 10 October 1894 at Maisons-Laffitte.

519–534), and an obituary by Henri Cordier, with a list of his writings, in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (January 1895); see also Gaston Paris, "James Darmesteter," in Penseurs et poètes (1896), (pp. 1–61).