The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1871-04-20
THE LOUVRE.


The Louvre is building OF countless ira
ditions. lie Bon Roi Dagoberti is said to have
kept his horses and wolf-hounds here when
the river bank was all forest. Philip Angus
tus about the year 1900, converted the hunt
ing box of the early French kings into tower
and moated fortress. A great tower in the
centre was the keep; and dukes of Brittany,
kings of Navarro, and counts Of Flanders, in
various ages, acquired rheumatism in its
dungeons. The old fortress was outside the
walls of Paris, but Charles and VI enclosed
it within the eRc6tnte for greater security
The original palace was only three hundred
feet long. The names of some of the towers
of the old Louvre-such as the Tour de FOR
geuil, TIE Tour on SO met le Roi quand on
joute, the Tour de la Fauconnerie-give one
the notion of a dismal, loopholed, turreted
kind of a Newgate, dark, strong, and repel-
ling. Francis l pulled down this old jack
davis nest, and reared an Italian palace,
where he entertained the Emperor Charles
V with reckless magni6cence. Henry III,
Catherine de Medicis, Charles TX, Henry
III, Henry ~, and Louis XIII all added
to the Louvre. 1t was from a riverside
window, in part of the building pulled down
by Louis XIII, that Charles TX fred
with insane eagerness on the Huguenots
to connect the Louvre with the Tuileries,
and completed it as far as to be able to walk
through it before his DEATH After his assas-
sination by Ravaillac, the kings body was laid
out in state in an apartment of the old
Louvre. But in the reign of Louis XIV the
old tree put forth a noble shoot At the sug-
gestion of Colbert, the king resolved to COM
piete the palace and the grand gallery parallel
with the river. Levau, the kings architect,
had begun the principal facade; but it did not
satisfy Colbert, who invited competition of
arohitoatu Tha r1lan ohOcan mo hu ia
Perrault, who had been bred q physician.
The south, or Seine, front was also by him.
The court of the Louvre is square of three
hundred and forty-eight feet. Voltaire says
of the facade of the Louvre:-'It is one of
the most august monuments of architecture
in the world, and there is not one of the
palaces of Rome whose entrances is COM
parable to that of the Louvre, for which we
are indebted to Perrault, whom Boileau at
tempted to turn into ridicule."
When Louis XIV began Versailles, he grew
tired of his other toy, the Louvre, part of
which remained unroofed even down to the
time of the great Napoleon, who completed
the long picture gallery connecting the Lou
vre with the Tuileries, and turned the palace
into vast national museum, full of the most
glorious plumber military thief ever looted.
On the 18th of February, 1920, and four
following days, the body of the murdered
Duc ue Osrrl, WHO nau uleu begging tnat
Louvel, his assassin, might be pard oned,
lay in state in the south quadrangle of the
Louvre.
One of the most historical rooms in the
Louvre is the Sale de Caryatdes, for here
Henry Tvs marriage was celebrated with
Margaret de Valois, and here he lay in state
after Ravaillac had struck the blow. In this
chamber the stern Due de Guise hung four of
the most reckless of the Leaguers; and here
Moliere built his theatre, and performed in
some of the best comedies.