French statesmen protested that the pictures and statues brought to Paris from so many foreign picture galleries belonged to France in virtue of formal treaties and conventions; Louis XVIII. himself declined to sanction the restoration of the captured pictures and statues. Denon, Director-General of Museums, resisted even when threatened with imprisonment in a Prussian fortress; and he made the foreign commissaries sign a declaration to the effect that in giving up the works claimed he yielded only to force. The so-called spoliation of the Louvre was at last effected. The pictures and statues, that is to say, which had been seized by victorious France, were from vanquished France taken back and replaced in the museums to which they had originally belonged. Since the fall of the First Empire the Louvre has acquired but few masterpieces from abroad. Italy now guards her art treasures with a jealous hand; and there are few countries where the masterpieces of antiquity can be purchased except when some private gallery is broken up through the bankruptcy or death of the owner. Under the new monarchy the beautiful though armless Venus of Milo was brought to France; and under the Second Empire "The Conception" of Murillo was purchased for 615,000 francs. The Third Republic, under the presidency of M. Thiers, spite of its difficulties in connection with the crushing war indemnity, paid 206,000 francs for a fresco by Raphael. The regular annual allowance to the Minister of Fine Arts for the purchase of pictures is now 100,000 francs a year. Meanwhile, the Louvre collection has been constantly augmented by pictures transferred to the more classical museum from the gallery of pictures by living artists in the Luxembourg. The pictures exhibited at the Louvre are arranged on a system which leaves nothing to be desired. The supreme masterpieces of the collection are all together, without reference to school, nationality, or period, in a large square room known as the Salon Carré. In the other rooms the pictures are arranged historically.