“ He was perpetual secretary of the Academy of Inscriptions from 1832 onwards; in 1808 he had entered the corps législatif; he was made a baron in 1813; 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. ”

“ In 1781 he was appointed councillor in the cour des monnaies, and was advanced in 1792 to be a commissary-general in the same department. De Sacy had successively acquired all the Semitic languages, and as a civil servant he found time to make himself a great name as an orientalist. He began successfully to decipher the Pahlavi inscriptions of the Sassanian kings (1787–1791) . [1] In 1792 he retired from the public service, and lived in close seclusion in a cottage near Paris till in 1795 he became professor of Arabic in the newly founded school of living Eastern languages. ”