Jules Berger de Xivrey

Jules Berger de Xivrey (16 June 1801 – 29 July 1863) was a French librarian and historian, considered one of the notable scholars of his time.

Biography

Jules Berger de Xivrey was born in Versailles, Yvelines, the son of a captain aide-de-camp, killed at the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805. He was raised by his mother and studied at the Prytanée de Saint-Cyr, then at the Lycée de Nancy. Without fortune, he obtained in 1819 a position as a clerk in the administration of the forests of the Duke of Orleans, but soon gave it up to devote himself to teaching and especially to the study of history and ancient languages.

Having acquired a thorough knowledge of Greek, he published in 1823 a verse translation of the Batrachomyomachia, or Battle of the Frogs and Mice, followed by a parody in burlesque verse that he discovered in the manuscript of an old French author. In 1830, he published a remarkable edition of the Fables of Phaedrus. He then entered into correspondence with the most famous philologists of Europe and never stopped widening the field of his studies. He became a doctor of philosophy at the University of Tübingen and a member of several French and foreign academies. In 1839 he was elected member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.

He was appointed librarian at the Library of the Arsenal, then assistant curator of the Imperial Library, but he succumbed to a long illness while still in the prime of his life. His library was sold publicly at the Salle Sylvestre on Wednesday November 25, 1863. His two main works are the Traditions tératologiques, ou Récits de l'antiquité et du moyen âge en Occident (Teratological Traditions, or Stories of Antiquity and the Middle Ages in the West), and an edition of the Lettres missives de Henri IV (Letters of Henry IV), published in seven volumes between 1848 and 1853 in the collection of unpublished documents on the history of France, commissioned by the Institute. He is also the author of a large number of articles and memoirs on subjects such as the Vie et les ouvrages de l'Empereur Manuel Paléologue (Life and works of the Emperor Manuel Palaiologos), the Polémique relative au cœur de Saint Louis (Polemic relative to the heart of Saint Louis) and the Premiers Essais de la typolithographie et de la chalcolithographie (First Essays on typolithography and chalcolithography).

Jules Berger de Xivrey died in Saint-Sauveur-lès-Bray, Seine-et-Marne.

External links

• Works by Jules Berger de Xivrey at Gallica
• Works by Jules Berger de Xivrey at Persée
• Works by Jules Berger de Xivrey at Open Library