The narrowest escape came just on the heels of what had seemed the greatest triumph of his life. At the Paris Exhibition of 1867, he had secured the first adequate representation of Egyptian antiquities. A small Egyptian temple was built, preceded by a short avenue of sphinxes; and within the temple were housed the finest specimens of art and craftsmanship which Egypt could produce. For six months all the world admired and wondered; then came the blow. Mariette had wrought too well, and made his treasures look too inviting. The Empress Eugenie had cast covetous eyes upon them, and the Khedive Ismail was informed that she desired to have the whole collection offered to her as a gift. Ismail, taken by surprise, and, as usual, short of cash, did not dare to refuse; but he had the sense to make his consent subject to one condition. “There is,” he said to the emissary of the Empress, “someone at Boulak more powerful than I, and you must address yourself to him.” It must have been the cruellest of blows to Mariette thus to be wounded in the house of his friends; but his resolution was proof against both imperial wiles and threats, and the collection returned in safety to its native home. The explorer had saved the treasures of the land of his adoption from the greed of his native land; but it was at a heavy cost that the victory was gained. The favour of France, which had always been one of his main supports, was immediately withdrawn, and for the next two or three years Mariette found himself in disgrace at the palace, and unable to obtain any support for his schemes. Curiously enough, it was the downfall of France in 1870 which brought him into favour once more with the Khedive, and for the last ten years of his life he saw the work to which he had given himself steadily growing, though on at least one occasion the proposal to raise a loan on the Museum was revived, and though Ismail’s grandiose plans for the extension of the buildings remained only dreams, which came through the ivory gate. In respect to the excavations which he kept so jealously in his own hands, Mariette’s energy was amazing, though its results were never so carefully chronicled as they might have been, and were sometimes scarcely chronicled at all. The two greatest charges to be brought against him as an excavator are, first, this lack of adequate publication of his results, a huge mass of precious material being gathered without anything to tell the student its actual provenance, or its historical connection, and, second, the craving for big and imposing results, which led him often to neglect the smaller but often more important material which would have been of priceless value to modern workers, but did not appeal to him, and consequently got overlooked and lost.