The picture-rooms are not so
brilliant, and the pictures themselves did not greatly win upon me in
this one day. Many artists were employed in copying them, especially in
the rooms hung with the productions of French painters. Not a few of
these copyists were females; most of them were young men, picturesquely
mustached and bearded; but some were elderly, who, it was pitiful to
think, had passed through life without so much success as now to paint
pictures of their own.
From the pictures we went into a suite of rooms where are preserved many
relics of the ancient and later kings of France; more relics of the elder
ones, indeed, than I supposed had remained extant through the Revolution.
The French seem to like to keep memorials of whatever they do, and of
whatever their forefathers have done, even if it be ever so little to
their credit; and perhaps they do not take matters sufficiently to heart
to detest anything that has ever happened. What surprised me most were
the golden sceptre and the magnificent sword and other gorgeous relics of
Charlemagne,--a person whom I had always associated with a sheepskin
cloak.
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