The family coming thus to Paris were part of a general movement and even their connection with Versailles can be paralleled. It would not have taken much, had things proceeded quietly, for Switzerland to have fallen into the orbit of the French monarchy within the next hundred years. After these nine formative years in the continued company of Madame Elizabeth, Marie Grosholtz enters the Revolution, and the connections of the family with the origins of the great upheaval are close, curious, and of intense interest. It was, it will be remembered, the bust of Necker from the collection of Curtius, then on exhibition, which the mob carried round at the beginning of the insurrection. The show of figures already well-known in Paris became the starting-point for the future collection. It was because the Revolutionaries from the very beginning of the movement showed so much acquaintance with those effigies that the continuous stream of further portraits began. That is why Marie Grosholtz was sent for time after time to take a death mask, to model a famous living man, to establish what afterwards became the invaluable record we still have. From 1787-89, the preliminary years when she was already at work, right on to 1802, a matter of 15 years, the most crowded of all history, the newly developed art went on actively without interruption. There is not, I think, in all history a parallel to so astonishing and lucky a chance. It was almost as though fate had designed a reporter, or a state portraitist for the benefit of posterity. You do get the same thing now and then in the shape of a chronicler who happens to keep out of the turmoil and mark the detail of his time, but it is extremely rare and in the case of plastic art, unique. The nearest parallel to-day--which may raise a smile on account of the extreme difference in time and manner--is that of Holbein’s portraits of the English Court. There also you get the living record marvellously preserved for future times. It is to our advantage that the character of this foundress does not diminish in energy with the passage of time. We see her doing the work of three people all through the years of her middle age and making decision after decision upon the fortunes of her house. And while she was thus conducting with one hand the financial side of the business, with the other she was herself still modelling perpetually, and with a third and quite separate faculty she was creating a school of her own, as it were, for the continuation of the modelling after her time. If ever there was the maker of an important thing it was this woman and if ever there was an important thing proceeding entirely from one individual, that thing is the collection which still remains to us.