THE STYLE OF THE EMPIRE. 



479 



449. PARIS : PORTICO OF CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES IN PALAIS BOURBON, 

 BY B. POYF/T (1807). 



monuments of the time the column and altar to the Supreme Being, 

 the temples of Equality and Fraternity these embellishments were 

 composed of lath, plaster, and paint, and proved as ephemeral as the 

 regime they represented. It would appear that the only permanent 

 monuments with which the Revolution endowed Paris consisted in a 

 pair of marble seats in the Tuileries Gardens. 



The onus of providing for public needs in a more enduring manner 

 fell on the succeeding governments. The first task of the Directory 

 was to house itself. For this purpose two houses of the royal family 

 the Palais Bourbon and the Luxembourg were adapted. The former 

 had been greatly altered by the last Prince of Conde, who had incor- 

 porated the adjoining Hotel de Lassay with it. It had since been 

 dubbed Palais de la Revolution. Gisors and Lecomte added to it 

 a hall for the deliberations of the new Council of Five Hundred. 

 Improving on the Hall of the Convention they made the audi- 

 torium semicircular in plan, thus giving an example which has been 

 almost universally followed in Continental and American parliament- 

 houses (Fig. 450). From motives of economy the architects were in- 

 structed to place it inside the old buildings and forbidden to project 

 the hemicycle or surround it with a colonnade as they wished to do. 

 The result was a blank wall, too bare for the taste even of that day, 

 and it had to be remedied, as best it might, by the addition (1807) 

 of the existing dodecastyle pedimented portico designed by Bernard 

 Poyet (1742-1824), a pupil of de Wailly, and a sort of architectural 



