oment when he should sally out to meet him and
leave his new-found friend, the Duchesse d'Etampes, in spite of her
pleadings for him to remain by her. All this is mere historic incident,
and has little to do with Francis's art instincts and ambitions. He
probably thought this very thing himself when he replied to the
importunate lady: "Duchesse, I must tear myself away without more ado; I
go to meet my brother monarch at Amboise on the Loire."

It was Francis I, the passionate lover of art, who collected the first
pictures which formed the foundation of the present collections of the
Musee National du Louvre. He bought many in foreign parts, and many
others were brought from Italy by Italian artists, whom he had commanded
to the capital: Primaticcio brought with him, upon his arrival, more
than a hundred antique statues. These art objects were first assembled
at Fontainebleau and ornamented the apartments of the king. Among them
were Da Vinci's "La Joconde" and Raphael's "Holy Family and Saint
Michael."

Henri II, Henri IV, and Louis XIII did little to enrich the art
collections of the palace, but Louis XIV charged his minister, Colbert,
with numerous purchases. In 1661 he bought the fine collection left by
Cardinal Mazarin, and ten years later purchased the contents of the
celebrated gallery belonging to the banker Jacob of Cologne. The state
expended for these acquisitions nearly six hundred thousand _livres_,
and received for this sum six hundred paintings and six thousand
drawings.

It was at this period that the royal collections were transferred to
Paris, a little before the death of Colbert, when they were placed in
the galleries of the Louvre; though it was a hundred years later that a
national museum was actually created. This was virtually brought about
from the fact that the royal collections were transported in a great
part to Versailles, only to be returned to Paris in 1750, transferred
again to Versailles, and ultimately to be returned to Paris under the
sheltering wing of the grand old Louvre.

The Museum of the Louvre, the Museum National et Central des Arts, is
the outgrowth of a Decree of the Convention, dated July 27, 1793. It was
aided and enriched considerably under Napoleon I, that passionate lover
of the beautiful, who, none too scrupulously, would even seek to "make a
campaign" in order to acquire art works for the museum of his capital.

Many of these abducted art treasures (like the horses