The King and the Regent

Among Jayne Wrightsman’s donations to the Morgan was a group of forty-one letters and documents signed by various members of the French court and other major European royal houses from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. The letter on the left, signed by Louis XVI and bearing an embossed royal seal, informs George III of the death of Louis’s aunt, Madame Sophie (whose yellow-bound books are on view elsewhere in the exhibition). At right, Philippe II thanks the marquis d’Avaray for his condolences at the death of Philippe’s daughter Marie-Louise, duchesse de Berry (1695–1719). The close relationship between father and daughter instigated many rumors and may have inspired Voltaire’s play Oedipus.