THE STYLE OF LOUIS XIV. 307 



a nobleman's mansion. Bernini's by its scale, by its Titanic force, 

 proclaimed itself without question the palace of the greatest king on 

 earth. The barocco quality of terribilitd required to be softened into 

 a suave majesty, and to be brought into some degree of harmony with 

 academic rules to be a true expression of French feeling ; and this 

 Claude Perrault now prepared to do in his new design, which surpassed 

 Bernini's in refinement of detail, in delicacy of feeling, in harmony of 

 spacing and proportion, as much as it did those of his French con- 

 temporaries in dignity and breadth. 



PERRAULT'S DESIGN. Perrault's design (Fig. 293) owes much to 

 Bernini its colossal scale, its giant order and the subordination of the 

 ground storey into a stylobate, the long, flat line of balustrade and 

 cornice, the simplicity of the mass, the unity of the conception. 

 Neither did he altogether avoid the faults criticised in Bernini. His 

 fagade hardly corresponds more closely with what is behind it. But 

 Perrault had a far better grasp of the problem before him ; he realised 

 that what he had to provide was a screen to an existing palace, which 

 was to express not so much the actual arrangements of this palace 

 as the majesty of the monarchy it symbolised. Whereas Bernini by 

 proposing an entirely new building deprived himself of any excuse for 

 resorting to ignoble stage tricks, Perrault in giving expression to a 

 greater truth might feel justified in ignoring smaller truths ; in making, 

 for instance, his fagade both longer and higher than the older buildings, 

 and thus necessitating the destruction of older work, which, if unfor- 

 tunate, was infinitesimal in comparison with the damage demanded by 

 Bernini. 



He originally intended that the fagade, which is about 565 feet long 

 and 95 feet high from the present ground level to the top of the 

 balustrade, should rise from a moat upon a battering basement with 

 rusticated coigns below the present ground line. He divided it in the 

 traditional manner into five vertical divisions, as even Bernini had done, 

 but instead of the usual pavilions, the narrow compartments at the centre 

 and ends are merely solid masses to counterbalance the voids of the 

 long intervening colonnades, which form the leading motive in the 

 design. Pediments and other features were at one time contemplated 

 for the crowning members of the end blocks, but were eventually 

 omitted, so that the balustrade runs from end to end broken only by 

 the central pediment. The two ranges of fourteen fluted Corinthian 

 columns (Fig. 294), nearly 40 feet high, standing out against a wall 

 treated originally only with niches and low relief ornament, are full 

 of stately dignity, and derive an unusual appearance of strength com- 

 bined with play of light and shade from the coupling of the columns. 

 But the setting back of the wall above the basement to permit of the 

 colonnade is a weak point in the design, for the eye is not satisfied 



