The iron gates of the north, south and east sides were put into place only in 1855, and at the Commune served their purpose fairly well in holding the rabble at bay, a rabble to whose credit is the fact that it respected the artistic inheritance enclosed by the Louvre's walls. No work of art in the museums was stolen or destroyed, though the library disappeared.
CHAPTER VII
THE TUILERIES AND ITS GARDENS
No more sentimental interest ever attached itself to a royal French palace than that which surrounded the Tuileries from its inception by Charles IX in the mid-sixteenth century to its extinction by the Commune in 1871.
The Palace of the Tuileries is no more, the Commune did for it as it did for the Hotel de Ville and many another noble monument of the capital, and all that remains are the gardens set about with a few marble columns and gilt balls—themselves fragments of former decorative elements of the palace—to suggest what once was the heritage bequeathed the French by the Médici who was the queen of Saint Bartholomew's night.
It was a palace of giddy gayety that drew its devotees to it only to destroy them. "Crowned fools who wished to be called kings, and others." Even its stones were chiselled as if with a certain malignancy and fatalism, for they have all disappeared, and their history, even, has not been written as large as that of those of many contemporary structures.
Of the last five kings to which the Tuileries gave shelter—not counting the Second Emperor—only one went straightway to the tomb; one went to the scaffold and three others to exile. A sorry dowry, this, for an inheritor of a palace at once so noble and admirable in spite of its unluckiness.
With the court followers and the nobility of the last days of the monarchy it was the same thing; the Tuileries was but a temporary shelter. The scaffold accounted for many and banishment engulfed others to forgetfulness.