His Royal Highness made his last acquisition in 1891, perhaps the most important of all, and one which certainly procured for him immense satisfaction--namely, forty miniatures by the famous Jean Fouquet from the _Book of Hours_ of Étienne Chevalier. These unique treasures were purchased from Herr Brentano of Frankfurt for the sum of 250,000 francs and will be fully described presently. [Illustration: Plate XXVI. Photo. Giraudon. PLAN OF ROME. Pol de Limbourg and his Brothers. From The "Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry."] The Musée Condé affords the most unique opportunities for the study of French art. The Wallace Collection may be richer in the work of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, but there is nothing in that collection which can compare with the examples of French fifteenth and sixteenth century art enshrined at the Musée Condé; for example, the exquisite miniatures of the Brothers Limbourg and of Jean Fouquet, or the precious pencil portraits by the Valois Court-Painters. It is to these that closer attention will be drawn in the following chapters. CHAPTER XII FRENCH ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPTS AT CHANTILLY [Illustration: Plate XXVII. Photo. Giraudon. JANUARY Pol de Limbourg. From The "Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry." _To face page 154._] The leading part taken by French Art in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was not continued in the same degree during the fourteenth and fifteenth. Nevertheless records have survived which afford sufficient information whence we may conclude that France was at that period not as entirely unproductive as has been hitherto supposed. It is true that, owing to the fact that the wall-decorations in the Hôtel St. Paul, the old Louvre, and the Hôtel de Savoisie in Paris, of the châteaux of Bicêtre and Vaudreuil in Normandy, and of the castles of the Comtesse d'Artois, have been almost entirely destroyed or demolished by fire, siege or climate, native works of art of that period have become extremely rare. Still those few which remain, such as the diptych belonging to the Earl of Pembroke at Wilton,[30] the _Parement de Narbonne_, now in the Louvre, the wall-paintings in the Cathedral at Cahors and in the Church of Saint-Savin at Poitiers, etc., testify amply to the importance of the work of that period. Moreover, the miniatures of that period have not shared the disastrous vicissitudes of the larger works. Thus the illuminated MSS. preserved at Chantilly offer a special interest and are of an almost unique value in the general history of Art.