hour that Marie Antoinette mounted the scaffold,--she who
had so wept for her son, the first Dauphin, who died the 4th of June,
1789, at the beginning of the Revolution,--the disinterrers of kings
violated the grave of this child and threw his bones on the refuse
heap. Iconoclasts, jealous of death, disputed its prey, and they
profaned among others the sepulchres of Madame Henrietta of England, of
the Princess Palatine, of the Regent, and of Louis XV.

In the midst of these devastations, some men, less insensate than the
others, sought at least to rescue from the hands of the destroyers what
might be preserved in the interest of art. Of this number was an
artist, Alexandre Lenoir, who had supervised the demolition of the
tombs of Saint-Denis. He could not keep from the foundry, by the terms
of the decree, the tombs of lead, copper, and bronze; but he saved the
others from complete destruction--those that may be seen to-day in the
church of Saint-Denis. He had them placed first in the cemetery of the
Valois, near the ditches filled with quicklime, where had been cast the
remains of the great ones of the earth, robbed of their sepulchres.
Later, a decree of the Minister of the Interior, Benezech, dated 19
Germinal, An IV., authorizing the citizen Lenoir to have the tombs thus
saved from destruction taken to the Museum of French Monuments, of
which he was the conservator, and which had been installed at Paris,
Rue des Petits Augustins. From thence they were destined to be returned
to the Church of Saint-Denis, under the reign of Louis XVIII.

At the height of his power, Napoleon dreamed of providing for himself
the same sepulture as that of the kings, his predecessors. He had
decided that he would be interred in the Church of Saint-Denis, and had
arranged for himself a cortege of emperors about the site that he had
chosen for the vault of his dynasty. He directed the construction of a
grand monument dedicated to Charlemagne, which was to rise in the
"imperialized" church. The great Carlovingian emperor was to have been
represented, erect, upon a column of marble, at the back of which
statues in stone of the emperors who succeeded him were to have been
placed. But at the time of Napoleon's fall, the monument had not been
finished. There had been completed only the statues, which have taken
their rank in the crypt. They represent Charlemagne, Louis le
Debonnaire, Charles le Chauve, Louis le Begue, Charles le Gros, and
even