A group of approximately 300 French-language volumes, primarily aristocratic letters and memoirs published from the late seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, came to the university in 1918-1919 from the estates of Archbishop John Ireland (1838-1918), the founder of the College of St. Thomas and the St. Paul Seminary, and Fr. William Etzel (1860-1919), who served as the college's first librarian as well as a professor of French and German.

Archbishop Ireland was educated in France, and a number of his French books (including many historical memoirs, mostly published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), found their way to the college library shortly after his death in 1918. Ireland evidently had inherited a number of historical volumes from one of his predecessors as ordinary of St. Paul, Bishop Joseph Cretin (1799-1857), another French-educated prelate, and these came to the library with Ireland's books. Fr. Etzel, who also was educated in France, collected a small group of fine eighteenth and nineteenth century editions of journals, letters, and memoirs of the French court and aristocracy covering the period 1500-1815. These came to the college library following Fr. Etzel's death.

Together the Cretin, Ireland, and Etzel books constitute a fine collection for anyone seeking original source material concerning the life of the French court and aristocracy over a period of three centuries.

For more information or assistance in your research, please contact the Special Collections Department by electronic mail (amkenne1@stthomas.edu), regular post (Mail 5004, University of St. Thomas, 2115 Summit Ave. St, Paul, MN 55105-1096), or phone (651-962-5467).

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