Jean-Pierre Guillaume is a French orientalist known as Pauthier. He is the author of important writings and studies on the East. Without discussing the greatness of the Mahabharata from where he has extracted this episode of Savitri, Pauthier humbly stresses that it "offers the most wonderful manners of a nation, a more complete picture, the largest, and a most wonderful time of the world." He does not hesitate to proclaim that compositions like the Iliad and the Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, " while admirable as they are, are fading before the great Indian epics like the Pindos and Seven Hills...