Like the Pharaohs of whom Bossuet speaks, Napoleon was not to enjoy his sepulture.  To be interred with pomp at Saint-Denis, while Napoleon, at Saint Helena, rested under a simple stone on which not even his name was inscribed, was the last triumph for Louis XVIII.,—­a triumph in death.  The re-entrance of Louis XVIII. had been not only the restoration of the throne, but that of the tombs.  The 21st of January, 1815, twenty-two years, to the very day, after the death of Louis XVI., the remains of the unhappy King and those of his Queen, Marie Antoinette, were transferred to the Church of Saint-Denis, where their solemn obsequies were celebrated.  Chateaubriand cried:—­

“What hand has reconstructed the roof of these vaults and prepared these empty tombs?  The hand of him who was seated on the throne of the Bourbons.  O Providence!  He believed that he was preparing the sepulchres of his race, and he was but building the tomb of Louis XVI.  Injustice reigns but for a moment; it is virtue only that can count its ancestors and leave a posterity.  See, at the same moment, the master of the earth falls, Louis XVIII. regains the sceptre, Louis XVI. finds again the sepulture of his fathers.”

At the beginning of the Second Restoration, the King determined, by a decree of the 4th of April, 1816, that search should be made in the cemetery of the Valois, about the Church of Saint-Denis, in order to recover the remains of his ancestors that might have escaped the action of the bed of quicklime, in which they had been buried under the Terror.  The same decree declared that the remains recovered should be solemnly replaced in the Church of Saint-Denis.

Excavations were made in January, 1817, in the cemetery of the Valois, and the bones thus discovered were transferred to the necropolis of the kings.

“It was night,” says Alexandre Lenoir, in his Histoire des Arts en France par les Monuments.  “The moon shone on the towers; the torches borne by the attendants were reflected from the walls of the edifice.  What a spectacle!  The remains of kings and queens, princes and princesses, of the most ancient of monarchies, sought with pious care, with sacred respect, in the ditches dug by impious arms in the evil days.  The bones of the Valois and the Bourbons found pele-mele outside the walls of the church, and brought again, after a long exile, to their ancient burial place.”

In a little vault on the left were deposited the coffins containing the bones of earlier date than the Bourbons, and a marble tablet was placed upon it, with the inscription:  “Here rest the mortal remains of eighteen kings, from Dagobert to Henry III.; ten queens, from Nantilde, wife of Dagobert, to Marguerite de Valois, first wife of Henry IV.; twenty-four dauphins, princes, and princesses, children and grandchildren of France; eleven divers personages (Hugues-le-grand, four abbes of Saint-Denis, three chamberlains, two constables, and Sedille de Sainte-Croix, wife of the Counsellor Jean Pastourelle).  Torn from their violated sepulchres the 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 October, 1793, and 18 January, 1794; restored to their tombs the 19 January, 1817.”