THE STYLE OF LOUIS XVI. 



437 



418. VERSAILLES : Louis XVI. 's LIBRARY. DESIGNED BY J. A. G 

 EXECUTED BY A. ROUSSEAU AND HIS SONS (1774). 



How much more hospitable an aspect though with inferior detail is 

 presented by the Hotel de Soubise, built sixty years earlier, and 

 approached through a similar court, where, however, the colonnades 

 lead up to a front honestly revealing its floors and windows ! 



One of the most attractive portions of the Hotel de Salm is the 

 wing nearest to the Seine (Fig. 412). Almost the whole of the elaborate 

 and beautiful internal decorations perished in a fire lit by the Commune 

 in 1871. 



HOTEL DE THELUSSON. The Hotel deThelusson (1780), a sumptu- 

 ous mansion in the Rue de Provence by Ledoux (1736-1806), now 

 destroyed, enjoyed great contemporary celebrity (Fig. 414). It illus 

 trated most of the same tendencies in style and planning as the Hotel 

 de Salm, and had a pronounced example of the English garden with 

 which the frigid classicalities of the day were usually combined, 

 approached through a colossal rusticated archway 40 feet high. Eccen- 

 tricity, the naturalist tendency in garden design, and the archaeological 

 in architecture, all signs of the break up of the old traditions, are 

 found here combined in one example. 



DECORATION. Interiors show the same tendencies as external eleva- 



