During Louis XVI.'s reign little or nothing was done. Soufflot was making feeble efforts to complete Perrault's north front when the Revolution came to arrest his work. So lost to reverence and devoid of artistic sentiment were the official architects of this period, that a sacrilege worse than any wrought by revolutionists was perpetrated at the instance of the canons of Notre Dame. Louis XIV. had begun the vandalism by demolishing the beautiful old Gothic high altar and replacing it by a huge, ponderous anachronism in marble, on whose foundation stone, laid in 1699, was placed an inscription to the effect that Louis the Great, son of Louis the Just, having subdued heresy, established the true religion in his realm and ended wars gloriously by land and sea, built the altar to fulfil the vow of his father, and dedicated it to the God of Arms and Master of Peace and Victory under the invocation of the Holy Virgin, patroness and protector of his States. Many of the fine old Gothic tombs of marble and bronze in the church, the monuments of six centuries, were destroyed. But to the reign of Louis the Well-Beloved was reserved the crowning infamy: in 1741 the glorious old stained-glass windows, rivalling those of Chartres in richness, were destroyed by Levreil and replaced by grisaille with yellow _fleur-de-lys_ ornamentation. Happily the replacing of the rose windows was deemed too expensive, and they escaped destruction. The famous colossal statue of St. Christopher, the equestrian monument of Philip le Bel, and a popular statue of the Virgin, were broken down by these clerical iconoclasts. In 1771 the canons instructed Soufflot to throw down the pillar of the central porch, with its beautiful statue of Christ, to make room for their processions to enter. The priceless sculpture of the tympanum was cut through to make a loftier and wider entrance, and the whole symmetry of the west front was grievously destroyed.[151] This hideous architectural deformity remained until a son of the Revolution, Viollet-le-Duc, restored the portal to its original form. After the havoc wrought at Notre Dame, Soufflot's energies were diverted to the holy mount of St. Genevieve. Louis XV. had attributed his recovery at Metz to the intercession of the saint, and in 1754, when the abbot complained to the king of the almost ruined condition of the abbey church, he found a sympathetic listener. Soufflot and the chapter, who shared the prevalent contempt of Gothic, decided to abandon the venerable old pile, with its millennial associations of the patron saint of Paris, and to build a grand domed classic temple on the abbey lands to the west. Funds for the sacred work were raised by levying a tax on public lotteries. The old church, with the exception of the tower, was finally demolished in 1802, when the rude stone coffin which had held the body of St. Genevieve until it was burnt by revolutionary fanatics, was transferred to St. Etienne du Mont.