A second version of the so-called Joseph Laporte's notebook on the French Expedition in Egypt and Syria

In 2007 was published the fac-simile edition of an original manuscript written by a French soldier of the Bonaparte’s Expedition in Egypt. Illustrated by naive colored plates by the hand of the author, this document relates, almost day after day, the French Expedition in Egypt and Syria, including the main battles between the French troops and the English and Mameluks forces, but also the discovery of an exotic country and its culture at the end of the XVIIIth century, from a young revolutionary French soldier’s point of view.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight a second version of this personal Description de l’Egypte, probably written slightly after the first one. A preliminary study show that this variant, still unpublished and mentioned here for the first time, is longer and contains more details, for example about the Cairo menagerie. Future researches will have to explain why those two versions were written and now coexist.