If Gothic tapestry had possessed a pecuniary value easily translated into cash, or if it had been closely associated with the most sacred religious things, we should have preserved less than is actually the case. As it is, it was seldom the victim of cupidity or fanaticism, but by its very nature it was perishable, and therefore nearly all the work antedating the fifteenth century has vanished. Its greatest enemy, however, was the ignorant and vulgar culture of the nineteenth century, and during the first fifty years of this destructive epoch it melted rapidly away. Just before the outbreak of the French Revolution it is no exaggeration to say that there were in France alone enough tapestries to carpet a road from Paris to Arras; of course, many were of the Gobelins type and comparatively valueless as art, but every château, every cathedral and monastery, almost every church had its sets of “arras,” and these were of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the curious products of the Renaissance were confined to kings, princes, great nobles, and to their respective palaces. With 1793 the massacre began; everything feudal, even by implication, was burned, sometimes just out of pure deviltry, as when tapestries were consumed in heaps at the foot of the “Tree of Liberty”; sometimes through thrift, as when in 1797 the Directory burned at one time nearly two hundred ancient works of art to recover the gold and silver bullion--which they did at this one holocaust to the value of $13,000. Mr. G. L. Hunter has reckoned the value of these destroyed tapestries at about $2,500,000 in the market of to-day. At this rate, the current value of all the tapestries in France at the Revolution would have been about $250,000,000.