EUGENE EMMANUEL V10LLET-LE-DUC. 397 



indicating a perfect clearness of conception, and a command of hand 

 which was t he result of almost incessant practice. The working- 

 drawings and details needed for the execution of his designs were also 

 almost entirely made by his own hand, and many of them were exe- 

 cuted upon the works under the eyes of the workmen. Measures 

 have been taken to collect and preserve such of these as can now be 

 recovered. 



For these literary and artistic labors were not his only nor his chief 

 occupation. During almost the whole of these forty years he was 

 engaged in the active practice of his profession ; not indeed to any 

 great extent in the planning and execution of new buildings, but in the 

 designing and carrying out of a series of restorations, in the course of 

 which a chief part of the most important monuments of mediaeval art 

 in France passed under his hand. Beginning with the restoration of 

 the Ste. Chapelle in the palace of St. Louis, in conjunction with MM. 

 Lassus and Duban, and the restoration of the abbey church of Veze- 

 lay, he undertook, in rapid succession, important works upon the 

 abbey church of St. Denis, and upon the cathedrals, among others, of 

 Paris, Amiens, Sens, Laon, Chalons sur Marne, Lausanne, and Tou- 

 louse. Much of this work, though called restoration, w T as entirely 

 new, and its great excellence testifies to his powers of design. In 

 original work, however, and in such pure inventions as form the illus- 

 trations of the second volume of the Entretiens, he was not altogether 

 so happy as where inspired, and to some extent controlled, by the exi- 

 gencies of archaeological propriety. It is not unlikely that his facility 

 of draughtsmanship served to supersede those slow processes which 

 are needed for the perfecting of an ideal work, and that in this respect 

 he suffered from the lack of that academic training which he so much 

 decried. 



Vast and engrossing as were these various labors, they did not en- 

 tirely occupy his time nor exhaust his spirit. His absolute conviction 

 of the futility and error of the system of architectural instruction pur- 

 sued at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts necessarily brought with it, in so 

 eager a nature, a desire to improve the administration of the school, 

 and to breathe into it a new life. The sympathetic appreciation of 

 the Count de Nieuwerkerke, obtained for him, in 1863, an oppor- 

 tunity of- carrying into practice the reforms he had long desired. In 

 November of that year appeared an imperial decree transferring 

 the direction of the school from the Institute of France to the Min- 

 ister of Fine Arts. Important changes were at the same time made 

 in the system of administration, and M. Viollet-le-Duc was nomi- 



