THE STYLE OF LOUIS XV. 395 



the portico of the Riding School is a relic ; several of the six town gates 

 built at that time still remain. At Nantes, Gabriel also made a scheme 

 for laying out the new quarters to the west of the city, including houses 

 along the quays similar to those at Bordeaux. 



TOULOUSE, &c. At Toulouse the great square was regularised, 

 and one side of it formed by a new front 400 feet long, added to the 

 Capitole, or Town Hall (Fig. 380), by a local architect, Gammas 

 (1750-3). This majestic fagade is a rendering of the Louvre motive, 

 like its contemporary at Nancy, but in a pilastered instead of a columnar 

 architecture, the order being Ionic. The three projections are much 

 more strongly marked, and break forward with curved sweeps, concave 

 at the centre, convex at the ends. The pediments of the latter are 

 curved, and all three are surmounted by massive sculpture. The use 

 of brick, in alternate courses in the lower storey, and as walling in the 

 upper, give a local colour, and a warmth somewhat lacking in the 

 northern example, but the delicate detail and graceful rococo fancies 

 of the latter are absent, and the whole treatment is in a more emphatic, 

 almost barocco, spirit. 



In an age when one formula was followed everywhere for monu- 

 mental fagades, the ground storey acting as a pedestal to a giant order 

 embracing the two upper ones and when it was applied to public 

 buildings, palaces, and even private houses, not only in great cities, 

 but even to the town hall of such an insignificant country town as 

 Aire-sur-la-Lys, it is refreshing to meet with any departure from 

 the rule, such as the return to the large trophy panels, carrying a 

 pediment, loved by J. H. Mansart, in the additions to the little 

 Hotel de Ville of Abbeville (1747). This motive was still of fairly 

 common use in lesser monumental architecture, as in the Porte 

 Guillaume le Lion and the entrance to the Lycee at Rouen. 



The Hotels, Dieu of Troyes and Besangon, built about this 

 period, are of even greater simplicity, but not devoid of a certain 

 severe grandeur, their only ornament being very rich wrought-iron 

 railings. 



"PLACE Louis XV." COMPETITION. The culmination of the 

 movement for monumental planning was the competition held by the 

 city of Paris for a design for a place pour le roi (1748) without any 

 specific programme, which resulted in over fifty designs, suggesting 

 among them about a score of different sites for the King's statue. 



Patte's book gives a plan of Paris on which are marked nineteen 

 of the schemes submitted, accompanied by fuller illustrations of nine 

 of them, and one of his own combining different points in several of 

 the others. From a study of these documents one cannot but derive 

 a very high idea of the general level of architectural talent available 

 at the time. The uniform magnificence of these stately architectural 

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