The letter contains a copy of a short verse titled ‘À Mme la Duchesse de ***’. The lines of the poem have been added to the bottom of f.97v in two columns of four lines each.

Voltaire writes that it will be three months before the Crammers are able to provide copies of the Histoire Universelle, adding that he is working on the text as much as his poor health allows, and that as soon as the work is ready for publication he will try his best to fulfil the wishes of the recipient. He concludes by saying that he wishes he could provide the recipient with more solid proof of the true esteem and feelings he has for them.

In the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s catalogue entry, the recipient of this letter is given as Jean-Baptiste Rousseau. However, in the textual notes of both D8975 and D6577, Besterman instead suggests that the recipient was M. Durand.

This MS is a copy of Acts One and Two only. It is probable that the princess drew parallels between Lusignan’s fate and her own captivity. After her liberation, engraved words etched into the wallpaper of her antechamber at the prison were found. These read: ‘je désire Zaïre, Alzire, Amenaïde’.

An account of the Princess writing this manuscript survives. Alcide de Beauchesne noted that the guardian of the Temple prison, Gomin, found the Pricess with a copy of Zaire the day after the death of the Dauphin. He writes: ‘elle écrivait, elle avait un livre ouvert sous les yeux ; ce livre c’était un volume du théâtre de Voltaire, et ce qu’elle copiait, c’était la tragédie de Zaïre. Je possède les deux premiers actes de cette tragédie écrits, sous les verrous du Temple, de la main de la jeune Marie-Thérèse’. A letter from Gomin’s widow, Jeanne Madeleine Antoinette Lafontaine, to Alcide de Beauchesne was sold alongside this MS copy of Zaïre in which she bequeaths him several manuscripts including this one.