The works in the Musée du quai Branly that originated in the Bibliothèque municipale de Versailles were collected during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The earliest works come from the collection of Charles Philippe Fayolle, a commissioner in the French Marine. He began his collection in the 1750s and in 1786 it went into the possession of the Marquis de Sérent, the tutor of the children of the Comte d’Artois, grandson of King Louis XV. After the French Revolution, Fayolle became commissioner of the collection, which in 1806 became the Bibliothèque municipal de Versailles. Fayolle continued adding to the collection until his death in 1804. Ethnographic material was added to the collection throughout the nineteenth century. Three inventories were done of the collection at the Bibliothèque Municipal de Versailles, one in 1792 when the collection of the Marquis de Sérent(Fayolle’s collection) was confiscated by the government of the new Republic, another in 1806 when it was transferred to the Bibliothèque du ville de Versailles, and a third in 1869 when the collection of the Bibliothèque municipale de Versailles was transferred to the Musée d'ethnographie du Trocadéro.
Referring to these inventories can help to some extent to determine to what degree the MQB objects coorespond to the Fayolle collection and which were collected later in the nineteenth century.

Source: Estelle Begué, “De Versailles au musée du Quai Branly; Analyse historique d’un ancien cabinet d’historie naturelle du XVIII ème siècle,” Mémoire d’étude. Septembre 2009, École du Louvre