h rotting boarding. Perrault's columns on the
outer facade were unchannelled, the capitals unfinished, the portal
unsculptured, and the post-office stabled its horses along the whole
of the wing from the middle entrance to the north angle. The royal
apartments of Anne of Austria in the Petite Galerie were used as
stables; so, too, were the halls where now is housed the collection of
Renaissance sculpture. The Infanta's garden was a yard where grooms
exercised their horses; a colony of poor artists and court attendants
were lodged in the upper floors, and over most of the great halls
entresols were constructed to increase this kind of accommodation. The
building was described as a huge caravanserai, where each one lodged
and worked as he chose, and over which might have been placed the
legend, "_Ici on loge a pied et a cheval_." Worse still, an army of
squatters, ne'er-do-wells, bankrupts and defaulting debtors took
refuge in the wooden sheds left by the contractors, or built others--a
miserable gangrene of hovels--against the east facade. Perrault's base
had been concealed by rubbish and apparently forgotten. Stove-pipes
issued from the broken windows of the upper floors, the beautiful
stone-work was blackened by smoke, cracked by frost and soiled by
rusting iron clamps; the quadrangle was a chaos of uncut stone,
rubbish and filth, in the centre of which, where the king's statue was
designed to stand, the royal architect had built himself a large
mansion; a mass of mean houses encumbered the Carrousel, and the
almost ruined church of St. Nicholas was a haunt of beggars. Such a
grievous eyesore was the building that the provost in 1751 offered, in
the name of the citizens, to repair and complete the palace if a part
were assigned to them as an Hotel de Ville. In 1754 Madame de
Pompadour's brother, M. de Marigny, had been appointed Commissioner of
Works, and Louis was persuaded to authorise the repair and completion
of the Louvre. Gabriel being made architect set about his work in 1758
by clearing out the squatters and the accumulated rubbish in the
quadrangle, and evicting the occupants of the stables. The ruins of
the Hotels de Longueville, de Villequier, and de Bourbon were
demolished and grass plots laid before Perrault's east front, which
was restored and for the first time made visible. The west front,
giving on the quadrangle, was then repaired and the third floor nearly
completed, when funds were exhausted and it w