Escalier Daru

The new staircase or Escalier du Salon, which replaced the Escalier de l'Infante, opened on the ground floor on the Cour de la Reine that was intended to become the entrance of the museum, and led to what is now the Salle Duchâtel on the upper floor, immediately to the north of the Salon Carré in Le Vau's wing doubling the Petite Galerie to the west.

In the context of Napoleon III's Louvre expansion, Lefuel created a new entrance for the museum, west of the earlier one, on the ground floor of the Pavillon Denon.

At the western end, that was a new staircase named, like the gallery that led to it and the pavilion in which it stood, after Nicolas François, Count Mollien, another of Napoleon's ministers.

Lefuel had presented eight successive projects to preserve Percier and Fontaine's ensemble, but eventually gave up and dismantled most of it in 1865 to give way to the new one.

A team of Italian specialists created colorful mosaics for the vaulted ceilings, representing Victories holding palms and portraits of illustrious figures,[2][10] on a design by painter Jules-Eugène Lenepveu.

[12] Ferran covered the mosaics with stone-patterned wallpaper, broadened the stairs, and brought forward the Winged Victory to make it more prominent.