nt in the corner and
pounced upon it eagerly as the means of saving him from the dubious
efforts of the former incumbent.

It was the "non-professional" plan submitted by a doctor in medicine,
one Charles Perrault. Jealous competitors made all sorts of criticisms
and objections, the chief contention being that if by any chance an
architectural design by a "pill-roller" proved pleasing to the eye it
was bound to be impracticable from an economic or constructive point of
view, or both. This is often enough true, and it proved to be so in this
case, for in spite of a certain amount of advice from an expert Italian
builder, who had come to Paris to help the good doctor with his
difficult task (for he actually received a commission for the work and
completed it in 1674), the facade did not fit the rest of the fabric
with which it was intended to join up, and to-day it may be observed by
the curious as being several feet out of line with the structure which
faces on the Rue de Rivoli.

Louis XIV practically had no regard for the Louvre and its architectural
traditions; his palatial garden-city idea, worked out at Versailles,
shows what an innovator he was. He allowed the Louvre to be filled up
with all sorts of riffraff, who were often given a lodging there in
place of a money payment for some service rendered. The Louvre thus
became a sort of genteel poor-house, while king and court spent their
time in the more ample country-house behind the Meudon hills.

By 1750 the Louvre had become little more than an immense ruin, humbled
and desecrated; a veritable orphan. The Marquis de Marigny, Surintendant
des Batiments Royaux, obtained the authorization to chase out the
parasites and clean up the Augean stable and put things in order as best
pleased his esthetic fancy, but only with the early years of the
nineteenth century did the Louvre become a real palace again and worthy
of its traditions.

From 1803 to 1813 the architects Fontaine and Percier were constantly
engaged in the work of repairs and additions, and built (for Napoleon I)
the gallery which extends from what is now the Place Jeanne d'Arc to the
Pavillon de Rohan, along the Rue de Rivoli. This detached portion (bound
only to the Tuileries) was finally joined to the seventeenth century
work of Lemercier under Louis Napoleon in 1852. This gallery, the work
of "moderns," is no mean example of palace-building, either. It was the
work of Visconti and Lefuel, and with the