as left unroofed. An
epigram, put into the mouth of the king of Denmark, who visited Paris
in 1768, tersely describes the condition of the palace at this time:--

"J'ai vu le Louvre et son enceinte immense,
Vaste palais qui depuis deux cent ans,
Toujours s'acheve et toujours se commence.
Deux ouvriers, manoeuvres faineants,
Hatent tres lentement ces riches batiments
Et sont payes quand on y pense."[155]

[Footnote 155: "I have seen the Louvre and its huge enclosure, a vast
palace which for two hundred years is always being finished and always
begun. Two workmen, lazy hodmen, speed very slowly those rich
buildings, and are paid when they are thought of."]

During Louis XVI.'s reign little or nothing was done. Soufflot was
making feeble efforts to complete Perrault's north front when the
Revolution came to arrest his work. So lost to reverence and devoid of
artistic sentiment were the official architects of this period, that a
sacrilege worse than any wrought by revolutionists was perpetrated at
the instance of the canons of Notre Dame. Louis XIV. had begun the
vandalism by demolishing the beautiful old Gothic high altar and
replacing it by a huge, ponderous anachronism in marble, on whose
foundation stone, laid in 1699, was placed an inscription to the
effect that Louis the Great, son of Louis the Just, having subdued
heresy, established the true religion in his realm and ended wars
gloriously by land and sea, built the altar to fulfil the vow of his
father, and dedicated it to the God of Arms and Master of Peace and
Victory under the invocation of the Holy Virgin, patroness and
protector of his States. The beautiful fifteenth-century stalls, the
choir screen, and many of the fine old Gothic tombs of marble and
bronze in the church, the monuments of six centuries, were destroyed.
But to the reign of Louis the Well-Beloved was reserved the crowning
infamy: in 1741 the glorious old stained-glass windows, rivalling
those of Chartres in richness, were destroyed by Levreil and replaced
by grisaille with yellow fleur-de-lys ornamentation. Happily the
destruction of the rose windows was deemed too expensive, and they
escaped. The famous colossal statue of St. Christopher, the equestrian
monument of Philip le Bel, and a popular statue of the Virgin, were
broken down by these clerical iconoclasts. In 1771 the canons
instructed Soufflot to throw down the pillar of the central porch,
with its beautiful statue