e by the prolongation
of this gallery by the Ducerceau brothers in 1595. The work existing
to-day, but only in its reconstructed form, is the same as that
completed by Napoleon III (1863-1868).

Charles IX and Henri III, though making the Louvre their residence,
practically had no hand in its embellishment. The former gave his
energies and ideals full play in the Saint Bartholomew massacres and
shot at poor unfortunates who fled beneath the windows of his apartments
on the quay-side of the Louvre. This, if not the chief incident of his
association with the fabric, is at least the best remembered one. Henri
III, too, led a scandalous life within the walls of the Louvre and fled
on horseback, smuggled out a back door, as it were, on a certain May
evening in 1588, never more to return, for the Dominican monk Jacques
Clement killed him with a knife-thrust before he had got beyond Saint
Cloud.

The accepted tale of the part played by the famous window of the Louvre
in the drama of Saint Bartholomew's night is as follows: As the signal
tolled from the belfry of Saint Germain l'Auxerrois it was answered by
another peal from the great bell of the Palais de Justice, where, within
a small apartment over the watergate of the Louvre, the queen and her
two sons were huddled together not knowing what might happen next. The
multitude streamed by on the quay before the palace, and, finally, amid
all the horror of Coligny's murder, and the throwing of his body from a
window of the Louvre to the street below, Charles IX stood at his window
regarding the fleeing Huguenots as so much small game, shooting away at
them with an arquebuse as they went by, and with an unholy glee, even
boasting that he had killed a score of heretics in a quarter of an hour.

Historians of those exciting times were perhaps none too faithful
chroniclers and Charles's "excellent shots" in his "royal hunt," and
hideous oaths and threats such as: "We'll have them all, even the women
and children," are not details as well authenticated as we would like to
have them. Like Rizzio's blood stains they lack conviction.

The ambitious white-plumed Henri de Navarre, when he became Henri IV of
France, set about to connect the tentacle which stretched southward from
the Old Louvre with the Tuileries (a continuation of the project of
Catherine de Medici), and, by the end of the sixteenth century, had
built a long facade under the advice of the brothers Ducerceau. This
work