In the original
inventory, discovered in the library at Versailles, were included
pieces of Saxony ware, Watteau figures, Sevres vases, dishes and cups,
Beauvais tapestries, clocks made by Robin and de Sotian, candelabra of
crystal, chandeliers of silver--all from the apartments of the King,
the Queen and the Dauphin. For 20,000 francs there was sold a tapestry
emblematic of the American Revolution. Creditors of the new Government
were paid in furniture and art works whose value they estimated to
please their own purses. A brochure published at Paris by Charles
Davillier recites the romance of "The Sale of the Furnishings of
Versailles during the Terror." To a certain Monsieur Lanchere, a
former cab driver who had undertaken the conduct of military convoys
and transports for the State, were assigned clocks, carpets, statuary,
chests, secretaries and consoles that embarrassed every nook and corner
of the spacious Paris mansion of which he became proprietor.
"Paris," narrates Monsieur Davillier, "was gorged after the sale at the
chateau of Versailles with priceless furniture and objects of _vertu_."
Newspapers were filled with the advertisements of second-hand dealers
offering to the public these souvenirs--redolent, splendid, tragic--of
a dead-and-gone dynasty, of an epoch vanished never to return.
The institutions whose establishment at Versailles definitely saved the
chateau and its dependencies for posterity, were, at the Palace, a
conservatory of arts and sciences and a library of 30,000 volumes; in
the Kitchen Garden a school of gardening and husbandry; at the Grand
Commune, a manufactory of arms; at the Menagerie, a school of
agriculture.
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