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Descartes’ Purloined Letter to be Returned

March 22nd, 2010 No comments
Portrait of René Descartes by Frans Hals

Portrait of René Descartes by Frans Hals

When Erik-Jan Bos, a scholar at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, conducted a recent Google search for documents referencing philosopher René Descartes, he made an extraordinary discovery. A letter written by Descartes in 1641, and later stolen from the Institut de France, had been buried in the archives of Haverford College for over a century. Its theft was documented in the 1880′s, when Count Guglielmo Libri, a mathematics professor and administrator for France’s public libraries, pilfered thousands of valuable letters and documents. He then fled to England to avoid prosecution and sold the pieces off to various buyers. The letter came into the possession of the Pennsylvania college as part of a large collection of correspondence and ephemera, signed by notable political and literary figures, donated by the widow of Haverford alumni Charles Roberts, class of 1864. It is likely that Roberts purchased the letter from a dealer, and did not know it was stolen. Read more…

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