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| Anonymous French Artist Le Bassin d'Apollon, Versailles 17th century drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Anonymous French Artist Louis XIV with Courtiers 17th century drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Anonymous French Artist Courtier of Louis XIV 17th century drawing, with watercolor Musée du Louvre |
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| Anonymous French Artist Royal Nurses at the Court of Louis XIV 17th century drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Anonymous French Artist Fall of Phaethon 17th century drawing, with watercolor (study for ceiling) Musée du Louvre |
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| Anonymous French Artist Creation of Adam 17th century drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Anonymous French Artist Apollo and Marsyas 17th century drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Anonymous French Artist The Lamentation 17th century drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Anonymous French Artist Apostle Paul on Malta shaking off Viper into Flames 17th century drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Anonymous French Artist Moses trampling Pharaoh's Crown 17th century drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Anonymous French Artist St Sebastian tended by St Irene 17th century drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Anonymous French Artist St Sebastian tended by St Irene 17th century drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Anonymous French Artist St Jerome kneeling before the Virgin and Child 17th century drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Anonymous French Artist Landscape with Rocks 17th century drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Anonymous French Artist Sheet of Studies 17th century drawing Musée du Louvre |
from The Little Walls Before China
A courtier speaks to Ch'in Shih-huang-ti, ca. 210 B.C.
Highness, the former walls were helpless. They
stood alone in the middle of small fields
protecting nothing. A single peasant's holding
engulfed each one as it ran briefly, straight
from noplace off to noplace, with ruinous steps
of broken stone at both ends. Only head-high,
without the towers, gates and towns of your great wall,
they stuck where they were, never rising over hills
or curving through valleys: nothing but shoddy masonry
and a mystery: who built them, how long ago,
what for? They seemed to have no role but balking
the reaper and the ox; their bases made
islands in the flashing scythe-strokes, where wild flowers
and shrubs sprouted.
So all the people praise you
for burying such walls and their memory
in your vast one, which joins them, stretching far
beyond where they once crumbled to hold your Empire:
a wall which therefore can never have an end
but has to go on extending itself forever.
How useful, how cogent your wall is: a pale
for the civilized, a dike against the wild people
outside, who trade their quiet human blood
for the rage of gods, tearing men to pieces,
throwing them, watching them fall. In burying
those little walls, Lord, you have covered our shame
at our ancestors, best forgotten, whose mighty works
were so pointless, or so pitiably useless.
Was all their effort so that daisies could grow in fissures?
So that some human work would rise over the flats
and weather till it seemed not human? Only
so that something of ours could be like trees and rocks:
docile-seeming, yet sullenly opposed
to use, and when compelled, only half serving,
reserving from the functions that we give them
a secret and idle self. The peasants would make
lean-tos for cattle against those walls: they served
for this alone.
– A.F. Moritz (1999)