THE STYLE OF LOUIS XV. 397 



dreams, and the ingenuity in utilising them for the practical needs of the 

 city there revealed, are positively startling when one considers that most 

 of the competitors are not otherwise known to fame. Among the ablest 

 submitted were no less than three alternative designs by the veteran 

 Boffrand. In one he proposed to recast the Place Dauphine, so as to 

 form an approach to the Palais de Justice. His second was an attempt 

 to meet one of the most crying needs of the capital, the remodelling of 

 the congested and ill-built quarter of the Markets. In a third he 

 suggested a solution of the old problem of the junction of the Louvre 

 and Tuileries, providing at the same time an opera house and an art 

 gallery in a pair of symmetrical buildings. 



Other architects also took the Louvre as their point of departure, 

 but proposed to lay out a square in front of the Colonnade. Other 

 designs again proposed a circular or quasi-circular place at the 

 meeting of several streets ; or again, a square or crescent opening on 

 to the river; and some involved the junction of the islands of the 

 Cite and St Louis. Most of them had an Hotel de Ville or other 

 public building as their chief feature. One design, submitted by 

 Servandony, was quite different from the rest, and consisted of a sort 

 of open amphitheatre or circus, to be used for popular spectacles. 

 Most of the schemes, necessitating as they did the destruction of large 

 and populous quarters, were judged impracticable, and a free site, 

 such as that contemplated by Servandony, being found in the waste 

 land beyond the Tuileries gardens, a new competition was held for 

 laying it out, the outcome of which, belonging stylistically to the age 

 of Louis XVI., will be described in the next chapter. 



CHURCH ARCHITECTURE. 



RELIGIOUS CONDITIONS. The religious state of France under 

 Louis XV. was not calculated to inspire a really great church architec- 

 ture, though large sums were continually being spent on places of 

 worship. Catholicism, it is true, still maintained its hold on the mass 

 of the population, but the bulk of the upper classes was divided into 

 sceptics or deists, who, like Voltaire, conformed to a minimum of 

 church observances because it was the custom, and libertines, like 

 the King, who compounded with Heaven for their excesses by spasmodic 

 fits of devotion or costly sin-offerings ; while the religion of the 

 remnant, who like the Queen, Marie Leczinski, were sincerely pious, 

 was devoid of any real intellectual basis, and consisted largely in 

 external forms, ascetic and superstitious practices, and indiscriminate 

 almsgiving. The decreasing part which religion played in the lives 

 of the nobility is illustrated by the fact that in private mansions the 



