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Marengo and Austerlitz, still spelled correctly over the void. The building supplied its own caption; Meissonier added only the Latin below.

In the spring of 1871 Paris, having survived a Prussian siege on rats and zoo animals, refused to hand its cannon to the government that had signed the surrender, and for 72 days the city ran itself as the Commune: part municipal republic, part social experiment, part standoff waiting for its ending. The ending came in the last week of May, when the army entered from Versailles and took the city back barricade by barricade. The week is still called la semaine sanglante, the bloody week; the courts-martial and the wall at Père Lachaise account for a body count usually given in five figures, and argued about ever since. As the army closed in, the Commune's men put petroleum and fire to the monuments of the power they were losing, and on the night of 23 May the Tuileries Palace, residence of French rulers from Catherine de' Medici to Napoleon III, burned for two days into a roofless shell. Meissonier, the most expensive painter in France and no friend of the Commune, came to the wreck of the Salle des Maréchaux and painted what the fire had left: the arches open to the sky, the marble columns calcined, the rubble field where the floor had been, and, through the empty doorways, perfectly framed, the gilded quadriga of the Arc du Carrousel, Napoleon's victory arch, untouched. On the fallen stone in the foreground he painted an inscription that is not there in fact, Latin of his own composing: the glory of the ancestors survives even through the flames. Above the arch, the carved names Marengo and Austerlitz still legible over the void, he had barely needed to invent anything; the building had written its own caption. The ruin then had a second career as an argument. For 12 years the gutted palace stood in the middle of Paris while monarchists demanded restoration, as building and as regime, and republicans preferred the lesson visible; the republic won, and in 1883 the shell was demolished, leaving the Louvre's arms open around a garden and a absence. The painting went to the national collection at Compiègne, where it remains the best record of the 12-year argument. Meissonier's Latin was a royalist's sigh, but the picture outgrew the politics: it is simply what a civilization looks like the morning after it loses an argument with itself, blue sky where the ceiling was, and the old victories still spelled correctly over the door.