SACY, Antoine Isaac, Baron Silvestrede (1758- 1838), the greatest of French Orientalists and the founder of the modern school of Arabic scholarship, was the second son of a Parisian notary, and was born at Paris on 21st September 1758. From the age of seven years, when he lost his father, he was educated in more than monastic seclusion in the house of his pious and tender mother. Designed for the civil service, he studied jurisprudence, and in 1781 got a place as counsellor in the cour des monnaies, inwhich he continued till, in 1791, he was advanced to be a commissary-general in the same department. De Sacy had a natural turn for business and liked variety of work, while he seems to have had little or no need of absolute repose. He had successively acquired all the Semitic languages while he was following the usual course of school and professional training, and while he was engaged in the civil service he found time to make himself a great name as an Orientalist by a series of publications which, beginning with those Biblical subjects to which his education and sympathies naturally directed his first Semitic studies, gradually extended in range, and already displayed the comprehensive scholar who had chosen the whole Semitic and Iranian East for his domain. The works of these early years do not show the full maturity of his powers; his chief triumph was an effective commencement of the decipherment of the Pahlaví inscriptions of the Sasanian kings (1787-91). It was the French Revolution which gained De Sacy wholly for letters. As a good Catholic and a staunch royalist he felt constrained in 1792 to retire from the public service, and lived in close seclusion in a cottage near Paris till in 1795 he was called to be professor of Arabic in the newly founded school of ...living Eastern languages. The years of retirement had not been fruitless; they were in part devoted to the study of the religion of the Druses, which continued to occupy him throughout life and was the subject of his last and unfinished work, the Exposé de la Religion des Druzes (2 vols., 1838). Nevertheless, when called to be a teacher, he felt that he had himself much to learn. Since the death of Reiske Arabic learning had been in a backward state, the standard of philological knowledge was low, and the books for students extremely defective. De Sacy set himself with characteristic thoroughness to complete his own knowledge and supply the lacking helps to others, and he accomplished this task on such a scale, with such width of range, precision of thought, and scrupulous attention to details, that he became the founder of a wholly new school and the father of all subsequent Arabists. His great text-books, the Grammaire Arabe (2 vols., 1st ed. 1810, 2d ed. 1831) and the Chrestomathie (3 vols., 1st ed. 1806, 2d ed. 1826-31), together with its supplement, the Anthologie Grammaticale (1829), are works that can never become obsolete; the luminous exposition of the grammar and the happy choice of the pieces in the chrestomathy—all inedita—with the admirable notes, drawn from an enormous reading in MS. sources, make them altogether different from ordinary text-books. The whole powers of a great teacher, the whole wealth of knowledge of an unrivalled scholar, are spent with absolute singleness of purpose for the benefit of the learner, and the result is that the books are equally delightful and instructive to the student and to the advanced scholar. A comparison of the first and second editions shows how much toil and research it cost the author to raise his own scholarship to the level which, thanks to his work, has become the starting-place for all subsequent ascents of the Arabian Parnassus.
De Sacy’s place as a teacher was threatened at the outset by his conscientious refusal to take an oath of hatred to royalty. He tendered his resignation both as professor and as member of the Institute; but he was allowed to continue to teach, and rejoined the Institute on its reorganization in 1803. In 1805 he made the only considerable journey of his life, being sent to Genoa on a vain search for Arabic documents supposed to lie in the archives of that city. In 1806 he added the duties of Persian professor to his old chair, and from this time onwards—as, in spite of his royalist opinions, he was ready to do public service under any stable government—his life, divided between his teaching, his literary work, and a variety of public duties, was one of increasing honour and success, broken only by a brief period of retreat during the Hundred Days. He found time for everything: while his pen was ever at work on subjects of abstruse research, he was one of the most active leaders in all the business which the French system throws on the savans of the capital, especially as perpetual secretary of the Academy of Inscriptions (from 1832); in 1808 he entered the corps legislatif·, and in 1832, when quite an old man, he became a peer of France and was regular in the duties of the chamber. In 1815 he became rector of the university of Paris, and after the second restoration he was active on the commission of public instruction. Of the Société Asiatique he was one of the founders, and when he was inspector of Oriental types at the royal printing press he thought it his duty to read a proof of every book printed in Arabic and Persian. With this he maintained a vast correspondence and was accessible not only to every one who sought his advice on matters of learning and business but to all the poor of his quarter, who came to him as a member of the bureau of charity. Yet he was neither monk nor hermit: he enjoyed society and was happy in forty-eight years of married life and in the care of a large family. Though small and to appearance of delicate frame, De Sacy enjoyed unbroken health and worked on without sign of failing powers till two days before his death (21st February 1838), when he suddenly fell down in the street and never rallied.
De Sacy wrote so much that a list even of his larger essays, mostly communicated to the Academy or in the Notices et Extraits, is impossible in this place, while his lesser papers and reviews in the Allg. Bib. f. biblische Litteratur, the Mines de 1’Orient, the Magasin Encyclopédique, the Journal des Savants (of which he was an editor), and the Journal Asiatique are almost innumerable. Among the works which he designed mainly for students may be classed his edition of Hariri (1822, 2d edition by Reinaud, 1847, 1855), with a selected Arabic commentary, and of the Alfiya (1833), and his Calila et Dimna (1816),—the Arabic version of that famous collection of Buddhist animal tales which has been in various forms one of the most popular books of the world. De Sacy’s enquiry into the wonderful history of these tales forms one of his best services to letters and a good example of the way in which he always made his work for the benefit of learners go hand in hand with profound research. Of his continued interest in Biblical subjects he gave evidence in his memoir on the Samaritan Arabic version of the Pentateuch (Mem. Acad, des Inscr., vol. xlix.), and in the Arabic and Syriac New Testaments edited for the British and Foreign Bible Society; among works important for Eastern history, besides that on the Druses already named, may be cited his version of Abd-Allatíf, Relation Arabe sur l’Égypte, and his essays on the History of the Law of Property in Egypt since the Arab conquest (1805-18). And, in conclusion, it must not be forgotten that his oral teaching was not less influential than his writings, and that, except Ewald, almost all Arabists of chief note in the first half of this century, in Germany as well as in France, were his personal pupils. Of the brilliant series of teachers who went out from his lecture-room one or two veterans still survive, and Professor Fleischer’s elaborate notes and corrections to the Grammaire Arabe (Kleinere Sehriften, vol. i., 1885) may be regarded as the latest tribute to the memory of the great master by a disciple who is now the patriarch of living Arabists. (W. R. S. )
SACY, Isaac Louis Le MAÎTRE de (1613-1681), a figure of some prominence in the literary annals of PoRT Royal (q.v. ), and after the death of St Cyran (1643) and Singlin (1664) the leading confessor and “director” of the Jansenists in France, was born in Paris on 29th March 1613. He was closely connected with the Arnauld family, his true surname being Le Maître and that of Saci or Sacy which he afterwards assumed a mere anagram of Isaac, his Christian name. He studied philosophy and belles lettres at the Collége de Calvi-Sorbonne, and afterwards, under the influence of St Cyran (see Duvergier de Hauranne), his spiritual director, joined his eldest brother Antoine Le Maître at Port Royal des Champs. Here he threw himself heartily into the life of the place, devoting himself specially to teaching and the preparation of school-books, his chief productions in this class being expurgated editions of Martial and Terence and a translation of Phaedrus. In 1650 he was ordained to the priesthood, and in 1654 he entered the field of theological controversy with a brochure entitled Enluminures de l’Almanach des Jésuites intitulé la Déroute et la Confusion des Jansénistes, of which it is enough to say that, if the Jesuit attack was in execrable taste, neither was the reply in keeping with the finer ethical tone of Port Royal. From 1661, after the breaking up of the Petites Écoles, he lived more or less in concealment in Paris until May 1666, when he was thrown into the Bastille, where he remained till November 1668. During his imprisonment he occupied himself with the completion of a new version of the New Testament, known as the Nouveau Testament de Mons (1667), and the remainder of his life was largely devoted to a similar translation of the Old Testament, based chiefly on the Vulgate, with Éclaircissements. These began to appear in 1672 and were continued down to the end of the minor prophets. As De Sacy knew nothing of Hebrew, this version is of no value as a contribution to scholarship, and in style it is more artificial and laboured than those which had preceded it. From 1668 till his death on 4th January 1684 he lived partly in Paris, partly at Port Royal des Champs, and partly at Pomponne, the seat of his cousin, the marquis de Pomponne. He was buried at Port Royal des Champs.
In addition to the works already mentioned, he published, under the pseudonym of the “Sieur de Beuil,” a French translation of the De Imitatione Christi (1662). He also translated Chrysostom’s Homilies on Matthew. See Sainte-Beuve, Port Royal, bk. ii. chaps. 17, 18 (ed. 1878).
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