1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Hervey de Saint Denys, Marie Jean Léon, Marquis d’

HERVEY DE SAINT DENYS, MARIE JEAN LÉON, Marquis d’ (1823–1892), French Orientalist and man of letters, was born in Paris in 1823. He devoted himself to the study of Chinese, and in 1851 published his Recherches sur l’agriculture et l’horticulture des Chinois, in which he dealt with the plants and animals that might be acclimatized in the West. At the Paris Exhibition of 1867 he acted as commissioner for the Chinese exhibits; in 1874 he succeeded Stanislas Julien in the chair of Chinese at the Collège de France; and in 1878 he was elected a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et de Belles-Lettres. His works include Poésies de l’époque des T’ang (1862), translated from the Chinese; Ethnographie des peuples étrangers à la Chine, translated from Ma-Touan-Lin (1876–1883); Li-Sao (1870), from the Chinese; Mémoires sur les doctrines religieuse; de Confucius et de l’école des lettres (1887); and translations of some Chinese stories not of classical interest but valuable for the light they throw on oriental custom. Hervey de Saint Denys also translated some works from the Spanish, and wrote a history of the Spanish drama. He died in Paris on the 2nd of November 1892.