But if this tolerant approach didn’t satisfy the Vatican, it appealed to the abbé Bignon, the French king’s librarian and the man who reorganised the Académie des Inscriptions in Paris. He requested the missionaries to be alert for Indic manuscripts, which he was keen to obtain to form the backbone of an Oriental library. In 1733, in the Lettres édifiantes, the Jesuits announced their response: the discovery of one of the ‘big game’ of the hunt, a complete Veda, long thought to have been lost.56 (It was in fact a complete Rig Veda in Grantha characters. *)
