Meanwhile, doubts had always been entertained as to the solidity of the theatre, which had been run up in from fifteen to sixteen weeks; and on April 14, 1794, the Committee of Public Safety ordered the transfer of the opera from the Porte Saint-Martin to the Salle Montansier, in the Rue Richelieu. M. Castil Blaze, excellent writer, but by no means free from prejudices, insists, in his "History of the Royal Academy of Music," that in the removal of the Opera to the Rue Richelieu there was a determination on the part of the Committee of Public Safety to burn down the National Library, opposite which the Opera was now installed. "How was it," he asks, "that the Opera was moved to a building exactly opposite the National Library--so precious and so combustible a repository of human knowledge? The two establishments were only separated by a street very much too narrow; if the theatre caught fire, was it not sure to burn the Library? That is what a great many persons still ask; this question has been reproduced a hundred times in our journals. Go back to the time when the house was built by Mademoiselle Montansier; read the _Moniteur Universel_, and you will see that it was precisely in order to expose this same Library to the happy chances of a fire that the great lyrical entertainment was transferred to its neighbourhood. The Opera hung over it, and threatened it constantly. At this time enlightenment abounded to such a point that the judicious Henriot, convinced in his innermost conscience that all reading was henceforth useless, had made a motion to burn the Library. To shift the Opera to the Rue Richelieu--that Opera which twice in eighteen years had been a prey to the flames--to place it exactly opposite our literary treasures was to multiply to infinity the chances of their being burnt." Mercier, in reference to the literary views of the Committee of Public Safety, writes in the _Nouveau Paris_ thus:--"The language of Omar about the Koran was not more terrible than that by the members of the Committee of Public Safety, when they carried this resolution:--'Yes, we will burn all the libraries, for nothing will be needed but the history of the Revolution and its laws.'" If the motion of Henriot had been put into effect, David, the great Conventional painter, was ready to propose that the same service should be rendered to the masterpieces in the Louvre as to the literary wealth of the National Library. Republican subjects, according to David, were alone worthy of representation. The Opera in the Rue Richelieu was, however, to be destroyed, as will afterwards be seen, not by fire, but in deliberate process of dilapidation.