on the list of articles to be disposed of.  In the original inventory, discovered in the library at Versailles, were included pieces of Saxony ware, Watteau figures, Sevres vases, dishes and cups, Beauvais tapestries, clocks made by Robin and de Sotian, candelabra of crystal, chandeliers of silver—­all from the apartments of the King, the Queen and the Dauphin.  For 20,000 francs there was sold a tapestry emblematic of the American Revolution.  Creditors of the new Government were paid in furniture and art works whose value they estimated to please their own purses.  A brochure published at Paris by Charles Davillier recites the romance of “The Sale of the Furnishings of Versailles during the Terror.”  To a certain Monsieur Lanchere, a former cab driver who had undertaken the conduct of military convoys and transports for the State, were assigned clocks, carpets, statuary, chests, secretaries and consoles that embarrassed every nook and corner of the spacious Paris mansion of which he became proprietor.

“Paris,” narrates Monsieur Davillier, “was gorged after the sale at the chateau of Versailles with priceless furniture and objects of vertu.”  Newspapers were filled with the advertisements of second-hand dealers offering to the public these souvenirs—­redolent, splendid, tragic—­of a dead-and-gone dynasty, of an epoch vanished never to return.

The institutions whose establishment at Versailles definitely saved the chateau and its dependencies for posterity, were, at the Palace, a conservatory of arts and sciences and a library of 30,000 volumes; in the Kitchen Garden a school of gardening and husbandry; at the Grand Commune, a manufactory of arms; at the Menagerie, a school of agriculture.  Halls that had echoed to the dance and the clink of gold at gaming-tables now heard profound lectures on history, ancient languages, mathematics, chemistry, and political economy!  Classic exercises beneath the painted ceilings of these memoried rooms!  Scholastic discourse where music and laughter had vibrated for a hundred extravagant years!

The galleries at the Louvre contributed to the new Versailles museum all the canvases of French artists that it possessed.  Fragonard and Greuze, Lebrun, Claude Lorrain, Mignard, Poussin, Rigaud, Vanloo, Vernet—­all were represented, some of them by numerous examples of their graceful art.  Besides, there was a Rubens Gallery, and two salons filled with the works of Paul Veronese.  Some of these treasures were later removed to the Luxembourg Palace, where the French Senate was sitting, and to the palace of Saint-Cloud, residence of Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul.  Little by little the canvases were dispersed, until, at the end of the Empire, the Versailles Museum of French Art ceased to be.