the fever of building that possessed the King until 1690. This was unfortunate in a period whose watchwords were symmetry, proportion, the organising of a building from end to end by one directing mind. By a point of obstinacy which was possibly also piety, the King refused to have the little château demolished which his father had built as a hunting box and supplement to St Germain. Charming in itself, the château of brick and stone was to remain throughout a centre for vast additions, successive wings advancing en échelon débordant, till the whole became a caricature of the characteristic château-plan of the time. This arrangement, as opposed to the older four-sided court plan, consisted in a three-sided structure, the main body at the back, wings at the sides, and a grille on the fourth side to enclose the forecourt. A result is that the far side, being visible from outside the square, is apt to be overwhelmed in perspective by the wings; and it is difficult to subordinate these to any central 'feature.' At Versailles this could not be attempted; and the vast arms sprawl outwards from the tiny head and shoulders. The chief effort of the reign was expended on a patchwork, the superhuman ambition of whose size was not matched with a corresponding scale or unity.

At the Louvre also there was the complication of an existing building and of a plan already modified once. When the fortress of Philippe Auguste and Charles V was marked for destruction, Pierre Lescot had planned a four-sided court to be decorated with the sculpture of Jean Goujon. The fragment completed had been quadrupled in extent by Le Mercier's plan, and his still existing central pavilion on the west side built. But his scheme was arrested halfway by the appointment of Le Vau under Louis XIV; and Le Vau suffered the same fate. When the King was persuaded in 1665 to sanction the completion on the east, Colbert was dissatisfied with Le Vau's design, and called in the architects of Paris to criticise. They promptly produced designs of their own. At this stage began what was on one side an intrigue, but on the other a notable departure in French architectural history. Charles Perrault, secretary to Colbert, had a brother Claude, a doctor by profession, but an architect by study and endowment. A design by

Claude Perrault was brought forward, and this and the rest were forwarded to Italy for further criticism. The Italian architects, like the French, volunteered designs, but in the upshot the renowned Cavaliere Bernini was summoned to Paris and invited to produce a scheme. It looked as if a fresh Italian invasion was to submerge the growing French-Italian tradition. Fortunately the design produced was a very bad one, as even Colbert saw with the aid of the Perraults. The Cavaliere had a royal progress, was flattered and pensioned, and a feint was made of carrying out his plans. But in the end Perrault's design was adopted under a committee arrangement that saved the face of Le Vau and secured his co-operation.

The design was in some ways closer to classic models than anything yet accomplished by the school. The eastern façade was windowless and showed no roof, its main feature a Corinthian colonnade. It had the virtues of unity and sobriety and of detail well subordinated to the whole. On the other hand, it was not pedantically scholastic; the scholars were scandalised by the coupled columns. These were the features that made it an event, a notable exercise in abstract architecture. Against it might have been urged that it did little towards the solution of combining the classic tradition with modern and French uses; the colonnade was a mask for buildings which it did not fit, and had no purpose beyond its appearance; its construction also depended upon a concealed system of elaborate iron rods and ties. It was its author's solitary success, a break in by the amateur among the professionals. Perrault's design for a triumphal arch was never completed; and the criticism it met with was not undeserved. The colonnade itself was arrested in the author's life-time; and the Louvre generally, as we see it, was not finished till the time of the first and second Empires.

Le Vau, thus trammelled at the Louvre, had a freer course in rehandling the Tuileries. But his work was swept away by the incendiaries of the Commune in 1871; visitors to Paris in the late seventies could still see the blackened remains. The building by which he is remembered in Paris is the Collège des Quatre Nations, the Institute on the other side of the river. We may

agree with Sir Reginald that there are weaknesses in the relation of centre to wings, and he is offended also by a lack of fineness in detail. But there is nobility in the conception, and those sturdy, weighty pavilions are one of the satisfactions to the eye in riverside Paris.

Louis XIV did little more of his own motion for the remaking of Paris. He allowed the citizens to put up to his glory the Place des Victoires and the Place Vendôme, both designed by Jules Hardouin Mansart and among his best claims to memory. The Place Royale, now Place des Vosges, built under Henri IV, had given the model for this treatment of houses on a uniform plan about an open space; and a fraction of the money spent on Versailles might have left Paris the richer for townplanning' of this character. One great public building Louvois provided for the broken men of the later wars, the Hôtel des Invalides. The architect was Libéral Bruand, and the building is a curious one. The centrepiece, a great arched bay, breaks in upon an immense repetition of small forms, original and surprising, like an impatient grasp at something vast, and an anticipation in stone of a form that belongs to the Crystal Palace and railway-station era. From Le Mercier onwards, not excluding Perrault, not even, pace Sir Reginald, the architect of Maisons, the centre-piece was one of the chief stumbling-blocks for architects.

It was under Louis XV, strangely enough, that a big scheme was carried through in Paris which was not a patchwork, and to which, with Sir Reginald, we can give whole-hearted admiration. The occasion and the man came together. In 1748 a competition was opened for a Place Louis XV, and all the prominent architects competed. In Patte's plan the sites suggested for these various designs may be seen peppering the city; and it was part of the good luck of the winning design that it did not, like so many of them, involve the destruction of ancient buildings. The winner, Ange-Jacques Gabriel, was allowed, against all professional etiquette, to incorporate in his final design any features he fancied in those of his colleagues; but, however arrived at, the two great piles in what is now the Place de la Concorde have the stamp of perfection and inevitability. The older Church of the Madeleine by Contant, which formed the

withdrawn centre between these masses, has made way for Vignon's new-Greek temple; the Place itself has been hacked about, and the statue of the King replaced by that museum-intrusion, an Egyptian obelisk. But the buildings stand at the node of the wonderful vista that runs from the Louvre to the Arc de Triomphe, and of the avenue that crosses the river to the Palais Bourbon.

How obvious and yet mysterious such successes in proportion are! It would seem that any one, given the elements to play with, might contrive the like, but Sir Reginald's pages prove how seldom the clinching takes place; and one architect after another, with the best examples before him, makes mistakes that all the others at once can point out. There is nothing here in the elements that can be called 'original,' no ambitious 'feature,' merely a right relation of mass and emphasis between the ends and the centre of a colonnaded front. The rhythm is simple and yet a little elusive; five units in the end pavilions against not ten but eleven in between, i.e. five and five with an extra one in the centre, and of the fives in the pavilions, two are solids instead of voids, so that a pediment groups the remainder as three; while the projection of those pavilions gives the inter-columniations a deeper emphasis of shadow.

Another great building was put into Gabriel's hands, the Ecole Militaire. For this he got out a vast design, but an economist, Paris-Duverney, was in power, and only a part was carried through. Something untoward also seems to have happened to the part executed, for the centre on the court side is imperfectly adjusted to the wings; but the centre itself is a solution of the combination of pediment with four-sided domical roof, the French 'pavilion' idea, that was seldom reached. The Palace of Versailles itself was to have been remodelled by Gabriel, and the Cour de Marbre at length abolished. But it survived that threat, as also the threats of the Revolution, and the appalling dream of Napoleon for an architectural panorama of his victories; one more pavilion only was at the time put up. But a theatre was added from Gabriel's design; and the Petit Trianon, which in its toy-like perfection and intimacy is like a satire on the vast and inhuman ambition of the rest.

In the provinces, also, notable work on a larger scale was accomplished. The buildings of the Place Royale at Bordeaux by the father of Ange-Jacques Gabriel are one of the most happy combinations of French and Italian elements. Emmanuel Héré's great scheme at Nancy is in some ways the most characteristic of the time, because Lamour's grilles are an integral part of it. Exterior architecture had remained sober in France, while a riot of sculpturesque curvature took possession of interior decoration and furniture, in forms that will not bear analysis, but serve to distribute gilding. At Nancy this fantastic side came into the open.

It is impossible here to follow the story further in or out of Paris; but, standing back from the achievements of individuals, we may ask, what addition did French neo-classic make to the resources of architecture? The Italian Renaissance did not merely revive ancient forms; it developed and invented; and the later French movement took up a tale that still runs on. One of those Italian inventions belonged to the revival of church architecture, namely, the dome. For the comparatively low vault of the Pantheon in Rome was substituted the lofty curve set upon a drum so as to show far and wide above the housetops. It betrays the influence and takes the place of the medieval tower; and the medieval cross-plan of the church involved, where it was adopted, another dislocation of the original. None of those children of the Pantheon was quite to match the great original in the simple and perfect combination of suband super-structure, but they were a magnificent addition to town landscape. Rome became a city of domes, and Paris took up the tradition of the Jesuit' Church in a soberer strain and with notable effect, if no one of the series, from Le Mercier's Sorbonne to Soufflot's Panthéon, was to equal either St Peter's or the masterpiece of Wren.

The other main invention of the Italians was the town-palace that superseded the fortress (with a counterpart in the country 'villa'); and the varieties of building that spring from this-public offices, commercial offices and warehouses, private houses and clubs-make up the. main bulk of modern architecture in streets and squares.