Speaking of picture galleries, we spent a pleasant hour in the gallery of the Luxembourg--a collection of paintings made up from the works of living artists, and of those who have been less than a year deceased. It is sufficiently small to be enjoyable. There is something positively oppressive in the vastness of many of these galleries. You feel utterly unequal to them; as though the finite were about to attempt the comprehension of the infinite. One picture here, by Ary Scheffer, was exhibited in America, a few years since. It is the head and bust of a dead youth in armor--a youth with a girlish face. There are others by Henri Scheffer, Paulin Guerin, and a host more I will not name. One, a scene in the Conciergerie, "Reading the List of the Condemned to the Prisoners," by Müller, haunted me long after the doors had swung together behind us. The palace of the Luxembourg, small, remarkable for the beauty of its architecture and charming garden, built for that graceless regent, Marie de Medici, is now the residence of the president of the Senate; and indeed the Senate itself meets here. We were shown through the rooms open to the public, the private apartments of Marie de Medici among them, in one of which was a bust of the regent. The garden, like all gardens, is filled with trees and shrubs, flowers and fountains, but yet with a certain charm of its own. The festooning of vines from point to point was a novelty to us, as was the design of one of the fountains. Approaching it from the rear, we thought it a tomb,--perhaps the tomb of Marshal Ney, we said, whose statue we were seeking. It proved to be an artificial grotto, and within it, sprinkled with the spray of the fountain, embowered in a mass of glistening, green ivy, reclined a pair of pretty, marble lovers; peering in upon them from above, scowled a dreadful ogre--a horrible giant. The whole effect, coming upon it unexpectedly, was startling.
We had a tiresome search for this same statue of Marshal Ney. We chased every marble nymph in the garden, and walked and walked, over burning pebbles and under a scorching sun, until we almost wished he had never been shot. At last, away beyond the garden, out upon a long avenue, longer and hotter if possible than the garden paths, we found it,--erected upon the very spot where he was executed. He stands with arm outstretched, and mouth opened wide, as though he were yawning with the wearisomeness of it all. It is a pity that he should give way to his feelings so soon, since he must stand there for hundreds of years to come. The guide-books say he is represented in the act of encouraging his men. They must have been easily encouraged.