The MS includes a number of pre-1739 variants, along with a new reading of l.82 as ‘artistement orné’.

The copy is found in a recueil of diverse theatre parts taken from a number of plays. The plays all seem to have been performed at the Château de Berny, home of the comte de Clermont.

This copy of the “fourth” London edition of 1728 includes a dedication in Voltaire’s hand that is dated 25 April 1728. In the dedication, Voltaire presents the edition to Queen Caroline, adding that he waited until the fourth edition was ready to send a copy of the work to the Queen as it was ‘plus correcte et plus épurée’. Despite his assertions in this dedication, Voltaire had written ten days earlier to present the Queen with a first edition copy of the work.

Voltaire’s dedication is, unusually, bound at the back of the volume and is upside down.

The letter was found within a copy of Voltaire’s Essai sur l’histoire universelle, tome troisième : contenant les temps depuis Charles VII roi de France jusqu’à l’empereur Charlesquint (Leipzig & Dresden, 1754), housed at the BCU Lausanne (1D 110 Armoire 46). This book contains numerous additions in a secretarial hand, themselves corrected by Voltaire, which were written on separate slips of paper and affixed to the book.

Voltaire remins de Crassier that he offered him [Voltaire] his good offices, an offer he is now taking up. He asks that de Crassier makes the insolent curé de Versoy feel that he does not want to prevent him from visiting a girl. He then mocks the abbé, saying that these funny people are starting to act like the police.

The first part of the letter is missing.

Jean-Baptiste-Guillaume Haillet de Couronne and Louis-Auguste Dambourney both acted as secrétaire perpétuel to l’Academie des Sciences, Belles-Lettres et Arts de Rouen.