The Topographical Evolution of the City of Paris 
Charles IX. The 
superb design of 
D elorme for the 
Tui 1 eries has 
been preserved 
by Jacques-An- 
drouet du Cerceau 
in the “ Plus ex- 
cellents Basti- 
ments deFrance.” 
11 was intended to 
have the same 
frontage on the 
garden to the 
west as the build¬ 
ing that was de¬ 
stroyed in 1871. 
To the east, to¬ 
ward the Louvre, 
there were to be a 
large square cen¬ 
tral court and two 
lateral buildings 
with oval courts 
in each. The en¬ 
tire palace, if it 
had been com¬ 
pleted, would 
have extended 
eastward as far as 
the Arc du Car- 
PLAN OF THE COMPLETED HOTEL DE VILLE WITH CHURCH OF SAINT-JEAN 
rouse 1. 
Delorme had 
finished the central portion only of the gar¬ 
den facade when the entire scheme was aban¬ 
doned by Catharine de Medici, whose atten¬ 
tion was diverted to the Hotel de Soissons, 
near the Halles Centrales, which was to be 
thereafter her town residence. 
The Tuileries was later completed toward 
the south by Jean Bullant and the younger 
Jacques-Androuet du Cerceau. In her bril¬ 
liant, but short-sighted way, Catharine de 
Medici conceived a scheme for connecting 
the Louvre with her new palace of the Tuil¬ 
eries by a gallery running along the bank of 
the river. The first step toward this was the 
lovely loggia called Petite Galerie, now the 
Galerie d’Apollon. From this, the Grande 
Galerie begun by Catharine de Medici 
and finished by Henry IV., ran directly 
to the Tuileries at the Pavilion de Flore. 
The superb scheme of Delorme for an 
immense palace in the Tuileries, or tile 
yards, seems to have suggested the possibil¬ 
ity of introducing a definite axis into the 
map of Paris. His design, as given by Du 
Cerceau, included a large garden, as wide as 
the length of the palace, and extending to the 
bed of the river at the Pont de la Concorde. 
Until Le Notre’s time the arrangement of 
this garden was simple, but it, of course, in¬ 
cluded a central passage vertical to the central 
pavilion of the Tuileries. This line, when 
produced toward the hill on which the Arc 
de Triomphe now stands, became the most 
important topographical axis of the city, and 
was undoubtedly determined at this time. 
It centered well on the Tuileries but not on 
the Louvre. To create the semblance of 
symmetry it was necessary to quadruple the 
Louvre court, thus diverting the axial line a 
few degrees to the north. This awkward 
202 
