Ferdinand Denis was the son of Joseph-André Denis, a French civil servant whose mastery of languages had a great influence on his son. His father held the post of sworn interpreter at the Conseil des Prises Maritimes and, intermittently, in the political section of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs (headed at that time by Talleyrand).

Denis studied Turkish at home in order to prepare himself to try to enter the École des Jeunes de Langues (future School of Oriental Languages). He did not win a place either in 1810 or in 1813. Léon Bourdon, one of his biographers, mentions that although the Denis family had limited financial resources, at that time they lived on the aristocratic Left Bank of the Seine (Léon Bourdon, Lettres familières et Fragment du Journal intime de Ferdinand Denis à Bahia..., 1957, pp. 145-148). His father had a library that was well stocked with works of the Enlightenment. He also received both men of letters and of science, among whom was the Portuguese poet Filinto Elísio, who, according to Bourdon, gave the young Ferdinand Portuguese lessons. His intellectual training as a self-taught man of letters was marked by the confluence of different disciplines (including literature, history, geography, ethnography and linguistics), which was much in tune with the spirit of the age, and resulted in a wide-ranging critical perspective of the culture of his time. As has been mentioned elsewhere, although Denis was “destined for a diplomatic career, he preferred to study languages and to travel the World”, typical passions of the Romantic man although not very profitable in the short and medium term (A. de Oliveira, “Denis (Ferdinand)”, Verbo – Enclopédia Luso-Brasileira…, vol. 8, 1999, column 1238).

With the fall of the Empire, the young Ferdinand sought to make his own living in the East, and so left for Brazil in search of a ship that would take him to Portuguese Goa. However, what he had expected to be a stay of just a few weeks in Rio de Janeiro and Baía became a two-year long visit (1817-19), turning him into a passionate enthusiast of the stunning landscapes of the practically virgin territory. His letters and diary reveal his ideas and also show his first attempts to express himself in a literary manner. His contact with the realities of Brazil was hard in social and political terms (the Pernambuco republican uprising occurred at that time), but exciting as far as literature and history were concerned. This contact dictated the future of the young man who, although aspiring to a diplomatic career, would instead dedicate a large part of his life to the discovery, study and publication of Portuguese and Spanish manuscripts.

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