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 5,650, is on paper; the other, numbered 68, of the Lavallière collection, is on vellum, and is richly illuminated; it does not contain the Brazilian and Patagonian vocabularies given in No. 5,650, and some rather indecent details are omitted or softened down, which leads to the conclusion that this copy was the one presented by Pigafetta to the Regent, Louise of Savoy. The third French manuscript, and the most complete, was in the possession of M. Beaupré of Nancy till 1855, it then passed into the Solar collection, and in 1861 was sold for 1,650 francs to a London bookseller, and, later, was bought by Sir Thomas Phillipps at Libri's sale.

M. Rd. Thomassy published a memoir in the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie of Paris, September 1843, in which he examines the question whether Pigafetta composed his account of his voyage in French. He has come to a conclusion (which M. Ferdinand Denis has also adopted) in favour of the French manuscript having been originally composed by Pigafetta, and not translated from the Italian, on the grounds of its being addressed to the grand master of Rhodes, Villiers de l'Ile-Adam, who was himself a Frenchman, and that Pigafetta had recently been made a Knight of Rhodes; and that Pigafetta used the French language for the device which he set up over his paternal house in the street of la Luna in Vicenza, "Il n'y a pas de roses sans épines"; that other Italians of the time had written in French; that the Italian MS. of the Ambrosian Library of Milan, published in 1800 by Amoretti, is in bad Italian, mixed with Venetian and