Indeed, this instance of Charles's barbarity is fully corroborated by historians. "When it was day-light," says Brantome, "the king peeped out of his chamber-window, and seeing some people in the _Faubourg St. Germain_ moving about and running away, he took a large arquebuse which he had ready at hand, and, calling out incessantly: _Kill, kill!_ fired a great many shots at them, but in vain; for the piece did not carry so far."--This prince, according to Masson, piqued himself on his dexterity in cutting off at a single blow the head of the asses and pigs which he met with on his way. Lansac, one of his favourites, having found him one day with his sword drawn and ready to strike his mule, asked him seriously: "What quarrel has then happened between His Most Christian Majesty and my mule?" Murad Bey far surpassed this blood-thirsty monarch in address and strength. The former, we are told by travellers in Egypt, has been known, when riding past an ox, to cut off its head with one stroke of his scimitar. The capital was dyed with the blood of Charles's murdered subjects. Into this very _Louvre_, into the chamber of Marguerite de Valois, the king's sister, and even to her bed, in which she was then lying, did the fanatics pursue the officers belonging to the court itself, as is circumstantially related by that princess in her Memoirs. Let us draw the curtain on these scenes of horror, and pass rapidly from this period of fanaticism and cruelty, when the _Louvre_ was stained by so many crimes to times more happy, when this palace became the quiet cradle of the arts and sciences, the school for talents, the _arena_ for genius, and the asylum of artists and literati. The centre pavilion over the principal gate of the _Old Louvre_, was erected under the reign of Lewis XIII. from the designs of LE MERCIER, as well as the angle of the left part of the building, parallel to that built by Henry II. The eight gigantic cariatides which are there seen, were sculptured by SARRASIN. The façade towards the _Jardin de l'Infante_, (as it is called), that towards the _Place du Louvre_, and that over the little gate, towards the river, which were constructed under the reigns of Charles IX. and Henry III. in the midst of the civil wars of the League, partake of the taste of the time, in regard to the multiplicity of the ornaments; but the interior announces, by the majesty of its decorations, the refined taste of Lewis XIV. NEW LOUVRE. The part of the _Louvre_, which, with the two sides of the old building, forms the perfect square, three hundred and seventy-eight feet[2] in extent, called the _New Louvre_, consists in two double façades, which are still unfinished. LE VEAU, and after him D'ORBAY, were the architects under whose direction this augmentation was made by order of Lewis XIV.