It is in this Catherine de Médici portion of the Louvre (1578) that the present Galerie des Antiques is installed, and which is usually thronged, in season and out, with globe-trotting sight-seers who give seldom a thought to its constructive elegance and its association with the Médici.
With the first years of the reign of Charles IX, there is to be remarked a notable slowness of procedure with regard to the construction of the New Louvre. This was brought about chiefly by the conception of the Tuileries and the work which was actually begun thereon. Soon a gigantic idea radiated from the ambitious mind of Catherine de Médici. In this connection it must be remembered, however, that Catherine, so commonly reviled as "the Italian," was not all Italian; French blood flowed through her veins through that of her mother, Madeleine de la Tour d'Auvergne. She came first to France, landing at Marseilles, whence she arrived from Leghorn, and forthwith commenced her journey Parisward, arriving finally at the Louvre as the bride of Prince Henri in the guise of a simple, clever girl, though indeed she was twenty years the elder.
Now she dreamed of uniting her chateau of the Tuileries with that of the king by a long, connecting gallery. She put action to the thought and under Pierre (II) Chambiges, a relative of the Chambiges of Fontainebleau and Saint Germain, the Petite Galerie, a mere means of communication between the two chateaux, and not the least to be likened to a defensive structure, was begun and work thereon carried out between 1564 and 1571, though it remained for Thibaut Metezeau, in 1595-1596, to carry it on a stage further under Henri IV.
This architect introduced the notorious mezzanine, which has so intrigued historians of the Louvre because of the unequal elevations of the various floors, a procedure which was unavoidable save by recourse to a substitution less to be objected to than the existing fault. Actually the connection with the Tuileries was made by the prolongation of this gallery by the Ducerceau brothers in 1595. The work existing to-day, but only in its reconstructed form, is the same as that completed by Napoleon III (1863-1868).
Charles IX and Henri III, though making the Louvre their residence, practically had no hand in its embellishment. The former gave his energies and ideals full play in the Saint Bartholomew massacres and shot at poor unfortunates who fled beneath the windows of his apartments on the quay-side of the Louvre. This, if not the chief incident of his association with the fabric, is at least the best remembered one. Henri III, too, led a scandalous life within the walls of the Louvre and fled on horseback, smuggled out a back door, as it were, on a certain May evening in 1588, never more to return, for the Dominican monk Jacques Clément killed him with a knife-thrust before he had got beyond Saint Cloud.