The artistic treasures we have thus briefly and summarily reviewed form but a part of the inestimable possessions of the Louvre. Collections of drawings; ivories; reliquaries and sanctuary vessels; pottery; jewellery; furniture (among which is the famous bureau du roi, the most wonderful piece of cabinet work in Europe); bronzes; Greek, Egyptian, Assyrian, Chaldean and Persian antiquities (including the unique and magnificent frieze of the archers from the palace of Darius I.), all are crowded with objects of interest and beauty, even to the inexpert visitor.
Of the gorgeous palace of the Tuileries, with its inharmonious but picturesque façade, stretching across the western limit of the Louvre from the Pavilion de Flore to the Pavilion de Marsan, not one stone is left on another. We remember it after its fiery purgation by the Commune in 1871, a gaunt shell blackened and ruined, fitting emblem of the wreck which the enthroned wantonness and corruption of the Second Empire had made of France.
