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 Louis d'Outremer, who, nevertheless, was only a king.

Like the Pharaohs of whom Bossuet speaks, Napoleon was not to enjoy his sepulture. To be interred with pomp at Saint-Denis, while Napoleon, at Saint Helena, rested under a simple stone on which not even his name was inscribed, was the last triumph for Louis XVIII.,--a triumph in death. The re-entrance of Louis XVIII. had been not only the restoration of the throne, but that of the tombs. The 21st of January, 1815, twenty-two years, to the very day, after the death of Louis XVI., the remains of the unhappy King and those of his Queen, Marie Antoinette, were transferred to the Church of Saint-Denis, where their solemn obsequies were celebrated. Chateaubriand cried:--

"What hand has reconstructed the roof of these vaults and prepared these empty tombs? The hand of him who was seated on the throne of the Bourbons. O Providence! He believed that he was preparing the sepulchres of his race, and he was but building the tomb of Louis XVI. Injustice reigns but for a moment; it is virtue only that can count its ancestors and leave a posterity. See, at the same moment, the master of the earth falls, Louis XVIII. regains the sceptre, Louis XVI. finds again the sepulture of his fathers."

At the beginning of the Second Restoration, the King determined, by a decree of the 4th of April, 1816, that search should be made in the cemetery of the Valois, about the Church of Saint-Denis, in order to recover the remains of his ancestors that might have escaped the action of the bed of quicklime, in which they had been buried under the Terror. The same decree declared that the remains recovered should be solemnly replaced in the Church of Saint-