accomplish what he intended, and of the Bodleian's failure to realize that Thomas Hyde's manuscripts, which the Bodleian also had in its possession, included a transliteration table for Avestan script. Playing on the French antipathy towards the English, in his travelogue he later claimed that after seeing the facsimile pages of the Oxford manuscript, he resolved to "enrich [his] country with that singular work" and the translation of it.apud There was a government interest in obtaining eastern manuscripts; Anquetil-Duperron obtained a mission from the government to do so but, unable to afford his own passage to India, he enlisted as a common soldier for the French East India Company on 2 or 7 November 1754. He marched with the company of recruits from the Parisian prisons to the Atlantic port of L'Orient, where an expedition was preparing to depart. His friends secured his discharge and, on 7 February 1755, the minister, touched by his romantic zeal for knowledge, granted him free passage, a seat at the captain's table, an allowance of 500 livres from the library, and a letter of introduction to the French governor in India which would entitle him to a small salary while there. Anquetil-Duperron left France as a free passenger on 24 February 1755. First travels After a passage of six months, Anquetil-Duperron landed on 10 August 1755 at the French colony at Pondicherry, on the coast in south-eastern India. From his private correspondence it appears that he intended to become "master of the religious institutions of all Asia", which in the 18th century were still imagined to all derive from the Indian Vedas. For that, Anquetil-Duperron knew he would need to learn Sanskrit. He initially studied Persian (the lingua franca of Moghul India), which Europeans in the 18th century still presumed to have descended from Sanskrit. His plan was then to visit the Brahmins in Benares to learn Sanskrit "at some famous pagoda".apud Half a year later, he was living on rice and vegetables and saving his money so that he might "find some Brahmin" to become the disciple of. As he also wanted to "study the Indian books", he decided to travel to the French colony at Chandannagar, also known in French as Chandernagor, in Bengal, where he arrived in April 1756. He promptly fell sick; by coincidence, he landed in the hospital of the Jesuit missionary Antoine Mozac, who some years earlier had