The energy of Louis XIV. was followed by the apathy of his degenerate successor, Louis XV. (reigned 1715-74), who, however, added 300 pictures to the royal collection. The _Virgin with the Blue Diadem_ or _Virgin with the Veil_ (No. 1497), which still passes under the name of Raphael, was among the pictures which then passed out of the collection of the Prince de Carignan into the possession of the Crown. It was now a sorry moment for the pictures which, “scattered through the interminable and then ill-kept country palaces of the French Crown, exposed to every injury of time, ignorance, and weather, regarded at best in the light of old furniture and too often in that of old lumber, pleaded in vain for respect and care. No public Catalogue told of their existence; the generation that had talked of them had passed away; it was nobody’s business to ask for them, and few actually knew where they were. Even the new-comers passed into the same void which had swallowed their predecessors.” Some of the pictures previously recorded now disappeared completely, without leaving a clue to their fate. Eventually, in 1746, M. de la Fonte de Saint-Yenne in a pamphlet directed public opinion to the fact that these Crown pictures had for fifty years been hidden and neglected in “_une obscure prison de Versailles_.” As a result of this, in 1750, by the king’s permission, 110 pictures selected from the different schools of painting were brought from Versailles to the Palais de Luxembourg, where the large canvases by Rubens (now in the Salle Rubens at the Louvre) were regarded as forming a _centre d’études_. Here for the first time, and for two days only in the week, they were shown under certain restrictions to a limited public. In 1785 they were again removed to Versailles.