installed
in the Salle des Caryatides, gave the first "command" performance on
record. The plays produced were, "Nicodeme" and "Le Docteur Amoureux."

An "art note" of interest is that Sylvain Bailly, the first curator of
the Musee du Louvre, was born within its precincts in 1736.

In the dark days of July, 1830, the populace attempted to pillage and
sack the palace, but after a bloody reprisal retired, leaving hundreds
of dead on the field. The _parterre_ beneath the famous colonnade was
their burial place, though a decade later the bodies were exhumed and
again interred under the Colonne de Juillet in the Place de la Bastille.

Le Notre, the gardener of kings, laid out the first horticultural
embellishments of the palace surroundings under Louis XIV, and with
little change his scheme of decoration lasted until the time of Louis
Philippe, who made away with much that was distinctive and excellent.

Napoleon III came to the front with an improved decorative scheme, but
the hard flags of to-day, the dusty gravel and the too sparse
architectural embellishments do not mark the gardens of the Louvre as
being anything remarkable save as a desirable breathing spot for Paris
nursemaids and their charges.

The iron gates of the north, south and east sides were put into place
only in 1855, and at the Commune served their purpose fairly well in
holding the rabble at bay, a rabble to whose credit is the fact that it
respected the artistic inheritance enclosed by the Louvre's walls. No
work of art in the museums was stolen or destroyed, though the library
disappeared.

CHAPTER VII

THE TUILERIES AND ITS GARDENS

[Illustration: ORIGINAL PLAN of the TUILERIES]

No more sentimental interest ever attached itself to a royal French
palace than that which surrounded the Tuileries from its inception by
Charles IX in the mid-sixteenth century to its extinction by the Commune
in 1871.

The Palace of the Tuileries is no more, the Commune did for it as it did
for the Hotel de Ville and many another noble monument of the capital,
and all that remains are the gardens set about with a few marble
columns and gilt balls--themselves fragments of former decorative
elements of the palace--to suggest what once was the heritage bequeathed
the French by the Medici who was the queen of Saint Bartholomew's night.

It was a palace of giddy gayety that drew its devotees to it only to
destroy them. "Crowned fools who wished to be called k