he Orientalist.
He determined at once to give to France both the books of Zoroaster and
the first European translation of them. Too impatient to set off to wait
for a mission from the government which had been promised to him, he
enlisted as a private soldier in the service of the French East India
Company; he embarked at Lorient on February 24, 1755, and after three
years of endless adventures and dangers through the whole breadth of
Hindostan, at the very time when war was waging between France and
England, he arrived at last in Surat, where he stayed among the Parsis
for three years more. Here began another struggle, not less hard, but
more decisive, against the same mistrust and ill-will which had
disheartened Fraser; but he came out of it victorious, and prevailed at
last on the Parsis to part both with their books and their knowledge. He
came back to Paris on March 14, 1764, and deposited on the following day
at the _Bibliotheque Royale_ the whole of the "Zend-Avesta," and copies
of several traditional books. He spent ten years in studying the
material he had collected, and published in 1771 the first European
translation of the "Zend-Avesta."

A violent dispute broke out at once, as half the learned world denied
the authenticity of this "Avesta," which it pronounced a forgery. It was
the future founder of the Royal Asiatic Society, William Jones, a young
Oxonian then, who opened the war. He had been wounded to the quick by
the scornful tone adopted by Anquetil towards Hyde and a few other
English scholars: the "Zend-Avesta" suffered for the fault of its
introducer, Zoroaster for Anquetil. In a pamphlet written in French,
with a _verve_ and in a style which showed him to be a good disciple of
Voltaire, William Jones pointed out, and dwelt upon, the oddities and
absurdities with which the so-called sacred books of Zoroaster teemed.
It is true that Anquetil had given full scope to satire by the style he
had adopted: he cared very little for literary elegance, and did not
mind writing Zend and Persian in French; so the new and strange ideas he
had to express looked stranger still in the outlandish garb he gave
them. Yet it was less the style than the ideas that shocked the
contemporary of Voltaire. His main argument was that books, full of such
silly tales, of laws and rules so absurd, of descriptions of gods and
demons so grotesque, could not be the work of a sage like Zoroaster, nor
the code of a religion so much c