These are sixteen out of twenty-five volumes which were detached between 1779 and 1784 from a large collection of drawings of royal and other monuments and tombs in all parts of France, made by m. François-Roger de Gaignières, who presented them in 1711 to Louis xiv. The bulk of the collection is now in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris, which also possesses copies of the Oxford drawings made in 1860-66 by m. Jules Frappaz for the French Government.