About the year 1659 the sarcophagi were bought for Foucquet, and taken to the Superintendent's house. When La Fontaine saw them they no longer contained the bodies which Egyptian piety had destined them to preserve. The two mummies had been unceremoniously relegated to an outhouse.
As for the sarcophagi themselves, Foucquet had intended to send them to his house at Vaux. He had conceived the charming idea of restoring them from the land of exile to the pyramid from which they had been taken.[33] But his days of prosperity were numbered. This project was to be swept away like a drop of water in the great shipwreck. The two sarcophagi, seized at Saint-Mandé, where they had remained, were valued on the 26th of February, 1656, at 800 livres, and were classified as "two ancient mausoleums, representing a king and queen."[34]
A sculptor, whose name remains unknown, bought them at the public sale which followed Foucquet's condemnation. He then gave them to Le Nôtre. Le Nôtre, having passed from the service of Foucquet into that of the King, was then living in a little pavilion at the Tuileries, into which the two mausoleums, as the inventory calls them, could not enter. They were therefore highly inconvenient guests. They were placed "in a little garden of the Tuileries, where these rare curiosities remained for a long time exposed to the injurious effect of the atmosphere and greatly neglected."[35]
Finding that he had no use for them, Le Nôtre presented them to a neighbour and friend, M. d'Ussé, Comptroller of the King's Household, whose garden adjoined that of the Tuileries. M. d'Ussé had them placed "at the end of a bowered alley." According to the virtuoso, Germain Brice, the Comptroller, did not realize their value and their rarity. A Flora or a Pomona, smiling on her marble pedestal, would have been more to his liking. Nevertheless he had them taken to his estate of Ussé, in Touraine, which shows that he did not disdain them. Thus the repose which La Fontaine desired for these worshippers of Messire Orus was denied them. Even yet they had not made their last journey. M. d'Ussé had married a child of twelve, who was the daughter of a great man. Her name was Jeanne-Françoise de Vauban. Her father, then Commissary-General of Fortifications, paid a visit of some length to his son-in-law. He could not resist the temptation of shifting the soil, and he made a terrace; at the foot of this terrace he constructed a niche for the two "mausoleums." Now, half a century later there lived at a distance of five miles from Ussé an antiquarian called La Sauvagère, who went up and down the country examining ancient stones, for stones had voices before to-day. He did not fail to go to Ussé. He saw the sarcophagi, and marvelled at them. He wrote about them to Court de Géblin, who replied to his letter. Court de Géblin was investigating the origin of the world. This time he thought he had found it.
La Sauvagère published plates of the sarcophagi and of the hieroglyphics which covered them.[36] Here was a fine subject for conjecture. After thirty years, La Sauvagère's enthusiasm had not cooled. To the Prince de Montbazon, who had just bought the château, and the Egyptians with it, he ordained fervently: "Prince, there you have something which is by itself worth the whole of your estate."
In 1807 the Egyptians were still in the niche where Vauban had installed them. The Marquis de Chalabre then sold the estate of Ussé, which he had inherited from his father, but he kept the sarcophagi and took them to Paris th his apartment.
Then they disappeared, and, in 1843, no one knew what had become of them. M. Bonardot, the archaeologist, who displayed so much care in the preservation of old engravings, visited that year the cemetery of the old Abbey of Longchamps. By the edge of a path he discovered two stones sticking out of the ground. Having poked about with his stick, he saw that these stones were in the form of heads, and by the hair-dressing he recognized two Egyptians. He made inquiries, and learned that they were the two sarcophagi, sent there by M. de Chalabre's son, and forgotten. M. de Chalabre was then dying; his heirs had the Egyptians disinterred and gave them to the Louvre Museum, and there they are to-day.[37] Their names have been deciphered. They are not royal names. One is called Hor-Kheb, the other Ank-Mer.[38]
They wear their beards in beard-cases, according to the custom of their time and country, and it was these beard-cases that La Fontaine took for bibs.
The gallery of Saint-Mandé, which contained these two monuments that we have followed so far afield, was magnificently decorated with thirteen ancient gods in marble, life-size, and thirty-three busts in bronze or marble, placed on pedestals. Among these busts were those of Socrates and Seneca. Imagine these faces, brown or luminous, ranged about the chamber, where the books displayed the sombre resplendence of their brown and gilt backs. Imagine the pictures, the cabinets of medals, the tables of porphyry, the mosaics; imagine a thousand precious curiosities, and you will have some idea of this gallery, the rich treasures of which were to be dispersed almost as soon as they had been collected.
The Superintendent had little time for reading, but he loved to turn over the pages of his books, for he was a well-read man. He promised himself the pleasures of learned, leisurely study in his old age, when he would no longer read a welcome in ladies' eyes. Meanwhile, he had had twenty-seven thousand volumes arranged on the shelves of his gallery, around those two sarcophagi the story of which had carried us so far afield from Saint-Mandé and the last days of Mazarin. These twenty-seven thousand volumes comprised seven thousand in folio, twelve thousand in quarto and eight thousand in octavo. They were not all in the gallery. There was, in particular, a room for the "Alcorans, the Talmuds and some old Bible commentaries."[39]