46 Napoleon and the Louvre. [Feb. 7 



Another slide showed the famous F^te de la Liberte, in which the 

 procession of cars bearing these trophies was received in Paris on its 

 way to the Louvre. The lecturer then spoke of the stripping of the 

 German and Austrian galleries after Austerlitz and Jena, when 

 299 pictures were taken from Cassel alone ; and he briefly described 

 the Musee when it was at last completed in 1810, and as it was when 

 crowds of English visitors, including artists such as Lawrence and 

 Chan trey, visited it in 1814. Up to this point he had drawn chiefly 

 on the writings of the late Eugene Miintz, the late Frederic Yillot, 

 and M. Saunier, who has collected all the documents in his book, 

 ' Les Conquetes Artistiques de la Revolution et de I'Empire ' ; and 

 he also showed a fine copy of the splendid official publication, ' Le 

 Musee Francais.' In his description of the breaking up of the 

 museum by the victorious Allies, he partly followed Saunier and 

 partly the ' Letters and Papers ' of the Scotch miniature painter, 

 Andrew Robertson, who was an eye-witness. On the first Restora- 

 tion, in 1814, the xillies agreed not to disturb the museum ; but 

 the Hundred Days changed the position, and after Waterloo they 

 determined to claim their own, Bliicher and his Prussians being 

 particularly unbending, supported, in the interests of Belgium and 

 Holland, by the Duke of Wellington. The dramatic interest of the 

 story, said the lecturer, lay in the courage and ingenuity with which 

 the interests of the Musee were defended by its celebrated adminis- 

 trator, Vivant Denon, who fought a losing battle with extraordinary 

 skill, and succeeded in the end in saving a great many pictures and 

 other works of art which ought by rights to have gone back. His 

 resistance in Paris was at all events so ol^stinate that it probably 

 prevented the Allies from seeking to break up the provincial museums, 

 many of which still contain works taken by the French armies. The 

 lecturer concluded by an account of that curious affair, the removal 

 of the bronze horses of St. Mark's from their position on the top of 

 the Triumphal Arch in the Place du Carrousel, which was carried 

 out by the Austrians, as rulers of Venice, and excited the Parisian 

 population almost to insurrection. In the end the horses were 

 returned to their place, as were the Raphaels to Rome, the Correggios 

 to Parma, and the Rembrandts to Cassel ; and since that time, by a 

 sort of tacit agreement among the nations, works of art have never 

 been regarded as the proper spoils of war. 



[H. W.] 



