GRAFFIN, René. - Orientalist, b. at Pontvallain (Sarthe, France) on 22 March 1858, d. at Ste-Radegonde-en-Touraine on 3 January 1941, after having given decisive impetus in France to the study of the languages and literatures of the Christian East.
In Rome he completed his theological studies at the French Pontifical Seminary up to ordination to the priesthood; there, from 1880 onwards, he felt the call both to missionary work and to scholarship: to make known to Western Christians and to the Eastern Churches themselves the patristic, hagiographical, and liturgical treasures of Eastern literatures. After a year of advanced study in Innsbruck, he returned to the Catholic Institute in Paris, where he founded (October 1886) a course in Christian Oriental languages and literatures: Syriac, Arabic, Coptic, Ethiopic, Armenian, and finally, in 1927, Georgian; in 1894 he began the publication of the *Patrologia Syriaca*, joined (from 1907) by the *Patrologia Orientalis*, for which he had nine special Oriental typefaces designed, engraved, and cast; in 1896 the *Revue de l'Orient chrétien* appeared as a quarterly supplement to *L'Oeuvre d'Orient*. At the time of Mgr. G.'s death, the *Patrologies* numbered 28 volumes and the *Revue* 30 volumes. In this immense work his principal and tireless collaborator was one of his former pupils, the priest F. Nau.