John Nelson Darby is remembered for other things — he left the Church of Ireland, helped found the Plymouth Brethren, and put dispensational premillennialism into circulation — but he spent much of his life translating the Bible, and he did it in three languages. What is unusual about him is the order. Most translators work outward from their own tongue. Darby's English Bible was the last of the three to be finished, and its Old Testament was made not straight from the Hebrew by him but from the French and German versions he had already produced with other people.
This is the French one. Darby was the principal scholar but never the sole translator of anything bearing his name; the French team included William Joseph Lowe and Pierre Schlumberger. The New Testament appeared in 1859 and was reissued three times over the following two decades. The complete Bible came out in 1885 at Pau and Vevey — hence the name it is usually known by — though the title page is slightly misleading: Pau is in the far south of France, and the work was done mainly for the Brethren assemblies of French-speaking Switzerland. Darby had died in 1882, so he never saw the finished book.
The translation is literal on principle, and Darby said plainly why in the preface to his German New Testament: the learned can consult the original, so the point of a translation is to put as exact a representation of it as possible into the hands of readers who cannot. He also warned that a freer rendering loses meanings the translator himself may not have caught. The result is exact and unlovely, and was never meant to be read aloud — in his own preaching Darby used the King James Version.
Two things connect it to the rest of this corpus. The German Darby Bible is the Elberfelder, which is here as Elberfelder 1905 — the same man, the same principles, and one of the two texts his English Old Testament was assembled from, so these two French and German cards are closer kin than their different languages suggest. And its treatment of the divine name puts it beside the American Standard Version, which prints “Jehovah” thousands of times where the King James Version prints “the LORD”; Darby made the same decision first, in three languages. In the reader it is the only French Bible, so a French interface opens on it. It has no recorded parent in the lineage rungs, and unlike most of the dated editions here its rung chip carries no year at all — the catalogue card shows 1885, but the rung years are a separate curated list and this edition is not yet on it.