There was then at Rome a German Jesuit, by name Athanasius Kircher, a man of vivid imagination, very learned, who, having dabbled in physics, chemistry, natural history, theology, antiquities, music, ancient and modern languages, invented the magic lantern. This reverend Father really knew Coptic, and thought he knew something of the language of the ancient Egyptians. To prove this he wrote a large quarto volume entitled _Lingua Ægyptiaca restituta,_ which proves quite the contrary. But it is very easy to deceive oneself, especially when one is a scholar. A brother of his in Jesus, Father Brusset, told him of the arrival of the two ancient coffins, and Father Kircher went to Marseilles to see them. Later he treated of them in his _Œdipus Ægyptiacus,_ a pleasant day-dream in four folio volumes; La Fontaine's, in the Saint-Mandé library, was at all events shorter. About the year 1659 the sarcophagi were bought for Foucquet, and taken to the Superintendent's house. When La Fontaine saw them they no longer contained the bodies which Egyptian piety had destined them to preserve. The two mummies had been unceremoniously relegated to an outhouse. As for the sarcophagi themselves, Foucquet had intended to send them to his house at Vaux. He had conceived the charming idea of restoring them from the land of exile to the pyramid from which they had been taken.[33] But his days of prosperity were numbered. This project was to be swept away like a drop of water in the great shipwreck. The two sarcophagi, seized at Saint-Mandé, where they had remained, were valued on the 26th of February, 1656, at 800 livres, and were classified as "two ancient mausoleums, representing a king and queen."[34] A sculptor, whose name remains unknown, bought them at the public sale which followed Foucquet's condemnation. He then gave them to Le Nôtre. Le Nôtre, having passed from the service of Foucquet into that of the King, was then living in a little pavilion at the Tuileries, into which the two mausoleums, as the inventory calls them, could not enter. They were therefore highly inconvenient guests. They were placed "in a little garden of the Tuileries, where these rare curiosities remained for a long time exposed to the injurious effect of the atmosphere and greatly neglected."[35]