Voiage fait en La terre Sainte ...

Turpetin, an officer of the salt monopoly in Beaugency, undertook his pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1715, departing from Marseilles. He was gone for just over a year, stopping at Cyprus on both the outward and return voyages. He left Rhodes at the end of June, 1715, reached Antalya (Satalie) at the beginning of July, and by July 4th he arrived in Cyprus, where he spent a few days. He describes the island as fertile and well cultivated. On the return voyage he landed in Cyprus on the 12th of September and departed on the 2nd of October. The text on Cyprus is to be found on pp. 21-24 and pp. 146-147.

A widower with children, on his return from pilgrimage he entered the priesthood, and in 1740 he was appointed priest at the Hotel Dieu, the poorhouse of Beaugency. The Turpetin family continued to be known in Beaugency well into the late 19^th century.

Several copies of this manuscript are known, the Ioannou copy in folio (198 pp.) described here, another in small 4to (137 leaves), and two in national collections in France. The small 4to form seems to be a somewhat shortened version of the original manuscript, with many changes in orthography and with a number of religious didactical passages omitted. It has passed through several hands, and there is a detailed description of it in a catalogue of the bookseller Camille Sourget (Catalogue de livres du XVe au XXe siècles, item 2, published after 2006). The same manuscript was sold at the Hotel Drouot in 2006 by Renaud & Giquello, lot 135, and later by Pierre Berge (J.-P. Morin sale, 4 November, 2011). Both Sourget and Berge described the 137 leaf manuscript as in the hand of the author. From these same sources we learn that copies of the manuscript were made by the grandson of the author, Nicholas-François Turpetin, in 1773, and by his great-grandson, Jean Chrysostome Turpetin, in 1818.

The manuscript was published at Orleans in 1889, edited and with notes by Alphonse Couret, in a limited edition of only 82 copies. The Couret edition seems to be based on the shorter version. According to Couret, the manuscript he based his edition on was transcribed in 1740 by the Sieur E.-G. Sello, calligrapher, but he does not tell us where the manuscript was located. Couret believed that Sello transcribed his copy from the original manuscript written by Turpetin. This belief is unlikely since the Ioannou manuscript contains material which is not in the printed version; it is unlikely that the copyist would have added additional material to an existing text. Couret also cites a copy of the manuscript in the Bibliotheque de l’Arsenal, ms. 3552, with a provenance from the library of the Augustins ‘du faubourg Saint-Germain’, with a variant title: Voyage de M. Turpetin, prêtre du diocese d’Orléans, et auparavant officier au grenier à sel de Baugency [sic], dans les saints lieux de Jérusalem. It seems that he did not actually see this copy, but he assures the reader that it must be the same work. Another manuscript account, presumably in a much abridged form of 58 leaves, is to be found at the Bibliotheque Centrale, Amiens, in the Lescalopier collection, no. 104, ms. no. 5247.