but that he could see and admire works of art. Whilst there he also reported on 4,000 unpublished or little known sources, taught himself Provençal and formed his vast number of manuscripts into a collection of 23 folio volumes. He was interested in several literary deposits in France. Finally he gathered more than 4,000 summaries of manuscripts and copies of the most precious documents together. His research on the chroniclers and romanciers led him to embark on a vast, three-pronged endeavor – to explain chivalry (adding a history of the troubadours as he went), to compose a dictionary of French antiquities, and to write a full glossary of variants of the French language. In 1758 La Curne de Sainte-Palaye was elected a member of the Académie française (he was also in the academies in Dijon and Nancy and a corresponding member of the Accademia della Crusca) and in 1759 he published the first edition of his Mémoires sur l'ancienne chevalerie, considérée comme un établissement politique et militaire, for which unfortunately he only used works of fiction and ancient stories as sources, neglecting the heroic poems which would have shown him the nobler aspects of an institution so soon corrupted by "courteous" manners; a second edition appeared at the time of his death (3 vols. 1781, 3rd ed. 1826). He prepared an edition of the works of Eustache Deschamps, which was never published, and also made a collection of more than a hundred volumes of extracts from early authors relating to French antiquities and the French language of the Middle Ages. In 1756, Sainte-Palaye published his Projet d’un glossaire françois, a plan for constructing an historical glossary of Old French from the materials he had been so diligently collecting. Despite the assistance of Antoine Guiroy, Louis-Georges-Oudard Feudrix de Bréquigny, and Georges-Jean Mouchet over many years, his Glossaire françois remained unfinished at his death in 1781. A few years later, Mouchet finally began to publish the Glossaire françois, but the French Revolution interrupted before the 1st volume was completely printed. Further decades passed before Léopold Favre at last assembled the manuscripts prepared by Saint-Palaye, Guiroy, Bréquigny, and Mouchet for publication as the Dictionnaire historique de l’ancien langage françois in 1875. No further editions have appeared. In 1764 a collection of his manuscripts was bought by the government and after his death were placed in the king's library; they are still there (in