st.

At the death of Henri II, Catherine de Medici came here to live alone,
and built the great extension, which stands to-day and joins the Old
Louvre with that portion along the banks of the Seine by the double
arch, through which swing the autobusses coming from the Rive Gauche
with such a Juggernaut grind that fears for the foundation of the palace
are ever uppermost in the minds of those responsible for its
preservation.

[Illustration: _The Louvre_]

It is in this Catherine de Medici portion of the Louvre (1578) that the
present Galerie des Antiques is installed, and which is usually
thronged, in season and out, with globe-trotting sight-seers who give
seldom a thought to its constructive elegance and its association with
the Medici.

With the first years of the reign of Charles IX, there is to be remarked
a notable slowness of procedure with regard to the construction of the
New Louvre. This was brought about chiefly by the conception of the
Tuileries and the work which was actually begun thereon. Soon a gigantic
idea radiated from the ambitious mind of Catherine de Medici. In this
connection it must be remembered, however, that Catherine, so commonly
reviled as "the Italian," was not all Italian; French blood flowed
through her veins through that of her mother, Madeleine de la Tour
d'Auvergne. She came first to France, landing at Marseilles, whence she
arrived from Leghorn, and forthwith commenced her journey Parisward,
arriving finally at the Louvre as the bride of Prince Henri in the guise
of a simple, clever girl, though indeed she was twenty years the elder.

Now she dreamed of uniting her chateau of the Tuileries with that of the
king by a long, connecting gallery. She put action to the thought and
under Pierre (II) Chambiges, a relative of the Chambiges of
Fontainebleau and Saint Germain, the Petite Galerie, a mere means of
communication between the two chateaux, and not the least to be likened
to a defensive structure, was begun and work thereon carried out between
1564 and 1571, though it remained for Thibaut Metezeau, in 1595-1596, to
carry it on a stage further under Henri IV.

This architect introduced the notorious mezzanine, which has so
intrigued historians of the Louvre because of the unequal elevations of
the various floors, a procedure which was unavoidable save by recourse
to a substitution less to be objected to than the existing fault.
Actually the connection with the Tuileries was mad