Be sure that if Don Juan had met Monna Lisa he would have spared himself the trouble of writing in his catalogue the names of 3,000 women. He would have embraced one, and the wings of his desire would have refused to carry him further. They would have melted and lost their feathers beneath the black sun of these eyes." [Illustration: THE RICHELIEU PAVILION.] Leonardo da Vinci is said to have been four years painting this portrait, which he could not make up his mind to leave and which he never looked upon as finished. During the sittings musicians played choice pieces in order to entertain the beautiful model, and to prevent her charming features from assuming an expression of wearisomeness or fatigue. Raphael is represented in the Salon Carré by "St. Michael and the Demon," painted on a panel framed in ebony. This admirable work is signed not in the corner of the picture, but on the edge of the archangel's dress. "Raphaël Urbinas pingebat, M.D. XVIII." runs the inscription, which Raphael seems to have wished to make inseparable from the work. Among the other pictures of Raphael chosen for places of honour in the Square Room are "The Holy Family," which originally belonged to Francis I., and the virgin known as "La Belle Jardinière. Among the other masterpieces contained in the Salon Carré may be mentioned Correggio's "Antiope," Titian's "Christ in the Tomb," Giorgione's "Country Concert," Guido's "Rape of Dejanira," Rembrandt's "Carpenter's Family," Van Ostade's "Schoolmaster," Gerard Douw's "Dropsical Woman," Rubens' Portrait of his Wife, a "Charles I." by Van Dyck, and Murillo's "Conception of the Virgin." This last-named work, as already mentioned, was purchased under the Second Empire for upwards of 600,000 francs. It formed part of a valuable collection of Spanish pictures belonging to Marshal Soult, and had been acquired by that commander under peculiar circumstances during the Peninsular War. A certain monk had been sentenced to death as a spy. Two monks from the same monastery waited upon the marshal to solicit their brother's forgiveness. Soult was obdurate, until at last Murillo's wonderful picture was placed before him. The picture was forwarded to France, and the too patriotic monk set free. Among the selected works by Italian, Dutch, Flemish, and Spanish painters are to be found a few by French artists--for example, the "Diogenes" of Poussin and the "Richelieu" of Philippe de Champagne; but not one work by an English hand. Nor in the famous Salon Carré of the Louvre is a single landscape to be found. * * * * *