moment, the master of the earth falls, Louis XVIII. regains the
sceptre, Louis XVI. finds again the sepulture of his fathers."

At the beginning of the Second Restoration, the King determined,
by a decree of the 4th of April, 1816, that search should be made
in the cemetery of the Valois, about the Church of Saint-Denis, in
order to recover the remains of his ancestors that might have
escaped the action of the bed of quicklime, in which they had been
buried under the Terror. The same decree declared that the remains
recovered should be solemnly replaced in the Church of Saint-
Denis.

Excavations were made in January, 1817, in the cemetery of the
Valois, and the bones thus discovered were transferred to the
necropolis of the kings.

"It was night," says Alexandre Lenoir, in his Histoire des Arts en
France par les Monuments. "The moon shone on the towers; the
torches borne by the attendants were reflected from the walls of
the edifice. What a spectacle! The remains of kings and queens,
princes and princesses, of the most ancient of monarchies, sought
with pious care, with sacred respect, in the ditches dug by
impious arms in the evil days. The bones of the Valois and the
Bourbons found pele-mele outside the walls of the church, and
brought again, after a long exile, to their ancient burial place."

In a little vault on the left were deposited the coffins
containing the bones of earlier date than the Bourbons, and a
marble tablet was placed upon it, with the inscription: "Here rest
the mortal remains of eighteen kings, from Dagobert to Henry III.;