FRENCH ARCHITECTURE.
France is the most self-concentrated of nations, the most given to self admiration, and the least prone to borrow ideas from others. There is nothing startlingly original, nothing strikingly picturesque or overpower ingly grand, in modern French architecture: it is but a variety of Renais sance founded in all its details upon classic traditions; yet it is capable of considerable variety, ranging from a quiet lintelled style with carved friezes and string-courses and a terminal cornice to the richest exuberance of columns, pediments, vases, mansard roofs, and tall dormers.
A description of the architecture of Paris is a description of that of all France, for modern art in France is homogeneous, or nearly so. Mag nificent regularity is the great characteristic of the streets of Paris. Each building has, indeed, features of its own, but the marked uniformity in height, the perfectly straight building-line, and the almost complete rule of classical motives are destructive of that picturesqueness which is met with in London and New York, and the want of color, the universal gray, adds to the magnificent monotony.
The Louvre, now shorn of its former companion, the Tuileries, the last remnants of which were swept away with the Commune which destroyed it, still stands unrivalled among Parisian structures. But edifices which more or less imitate the new Louvre have been built all over France, for the great pile, lacking in concentration, yet grandiose in all its parts, was epoch-making. Among these offsprings of the Louvre may be men tioned the Hotel de Ville at Marseilles, that at Havre, and the new Bourse at Lyons.
Paris has a perpetual increment of large structures of all classes— theatres, markets, exhibition-buildings, railway-stations, hotels, and grand mansions. The Halles Ceutrales, close by St. Eustache,•are the best known of the markets; they are principally of iron, in ten blocks divided by streets.
The" Gores," or railway-stations, are huge straightforward structures of masonry and iron, often grand in outline, but lacking the originality of such buildings as St. Pancras at London or even Broad Street Station
at Philadelphia. Too often they fail in perspective. Thus the termini of St. Lazare and of the Strasburg Railway have a facade consisting of a centre with two advancing wings equal in height to the centre. From the arrangement it results that unless the spectator stand in the exact centre, and as near to the central portion as to the wings, the latter appear to be the highest. This fault is evident in many French buildings. French architects seldom make perspectives; they study out every detail carefully and proportion masses and openings in a most painstaking manner upon successive series of sketches, studies, and finished drawings, but the actual effect of recess and projection is unknown until execution reveals it.
The New Hotel de Lille at Paris, erected in place of the one destroyed by the Communists, is a magnificent structure 464 feet long and 265 feet wide, with four facades, of which the one facing the Place de l'Hotel de• Ville is intended for the principal. It has the usual beauties and faults of French 'Renaissance, but affects rather the Renaissance of the age of the old Hotel de Ville than that of the Second Empire. It has high roofs, dormers, a central tower, ample portals, and a profusion of sculpture and statues. The openings are round-arched, and are separated from one another by pilasters. The central pavilion of the principal front is lower than some of the adjoining ones, which is not the case on the rear, the facade of which centres better. The front upon the Rue de Rivoli is scarcely important enough for that street.
..1fairies.—Although the Hotel de Ville is the chief of the Parisian municipal structures, many of the mairies built for the administration of the various arrondissements of Paris are fine and substantial structures. Like most French buildings, they generally surround a courtyard.