the Quadrangle and the Place du Carrousel to protect the workmen. Subsequent gifts and private legacies have since added priceless collections, the latest, that of Thomy-Thierry, endowing the Museum with numerous examples of the Barbizon school. [Illustration: CARDINAL VIRTUES. GERMAIN PILON.] [Illustration: _Diana and the Stag._] The ground floor, devoted to the plastic arts, contains in its antique section many excellent Greco-Roman works, but relatively few of pure Greek workmanship. Among those few are the beautiful reliefs in the Salle Grecque and, in the Salle de la Vénus de Milo, the best-known and most-admired example of Greek statues in Europe, which gives its name to the hall. It was to this exquisite creation of idealised womanhood that the poet Heine dragged himself in May 1848 to take leave of the lovely idols of his youth, before he lay, never to raise himself again, on his mattress-grave in the Rue d'Amsterdam. "As I entered the noble hall," he writes, "where the most blessed goddess of beauty, our dear Lady of Milo, stands on her pedestal, I well-nigh broke down and lay at her feet sobbing so piteously that even a heart of stone must be moved to compassion. And the goddess gazed at me compassionately, yet withal so comfortless as who should say, 'Dost thou not see that I have no arms and cannot help thee?'" It was a God with arms that poor Heine needed. An early work of a nobler and more virile type meets the visitor as he mounts the staircase to the Picture Gallery--the Victory of Samothrace, one of the grandest examples of pure Greek art in its finer period. Magnificent as the collection of antique sculpture is, the little-visited Musée des Sculptures du Moyen âge, et de la Renaissance will be found of greater importance to the student of French art. Here are examples, few but admirable, of the growth of French sculpture from the tenth to the sixteenth century contrasted with some masterpieces of the Italian sculptors, including Michael Angelo's so-called Slaves, being actually two of the Virtues wrought for the tomb of Pope Julius II. An interesting thirteenth-century coloured statue of Childebert from St. Germain des Prés, and a beautiful Death of the Virgin from the St. Jacques de la Boucherie, later in style, are especially interesting. Michel Colombe's fine relief of St. George and the Dragon; Germain Pilon's Theological Virtues from the church of the Célestins, and the Cardinal Virtues in wood from St. Etienne du Mont; Jean Goujon's Nymphs of the Seine, and Diana and the Stag, will illustrate the stubborn resistance made by the characteristic native school of sculpture against, and its gradual yielding to, the foreign influence of the Italian Renaissance. The gradual decline of French sculpture during the seventeenth century, its utter degradation in the reign of Louis XV., and signs of its recovery in the revolutionary epoch, may be traced in the Musée des Sculptures modernes. [Illustration: _The Burning Bush._]