The Palais de Justice is not a handsome building; the architecture of the wings is disproportionately small; they are not well connected with the centre; and the openings are everywhere too large. There are the materials of good architecture, but not well proportioned, nor well put together. It is very possible to spend a great deal of money to make a building beautiful, and utterly to fail, without any gross fault being committed; a truth of which many edifices both in France and our own country bear witness, and this among the rest. The inside is not better than the out, and the great hall, formed by a double vault supported on piers running down the middle, does no honour to the architect.
The Palace of the Luxembourg has a sort of ambiguous merit which it is difficult to understand. There is certainly something good in it, but I cannot undertake to define what that something is. Without dwelling on the rusticated columns and pilasters, repeated on each story, and the awkward manner in which the windows are inserted in the lower arches, we may observe, that the sort of half correspondence between the open arches of the gallery in the Rue Tournon, and the windowed arches of the elevated pavilions, is disagreeable; and that the central building is too trifling for the extent of the edifice. It would form a pleasing centre to the gallery only, supposing the pavilions taken entirely away. Or if the pavilions remain (with the loss, however, of the roof), an unbroken line of gallery would be better than one divided by this central elevation. On entering, the galleries to the right and left have a fine effect, which, however, is rather lost when we mount the little staircase to the galleries of painting: the rooms in which the paintings are exposed are not handsome. One of the finest of the internal parts of this building is probably the great staircase to the Chambre des Pairs. The paintings of Rubens you have heard enough of; they are rich and splendid, and that is all; the subjects are foolish, and the figures, for the most part, disgusting. Those of Vernet are good views, but one goes away and forgets them. There are some other works of the French school, of which those of Le Sueur and of Philippe de Champagne are the best.[[15]]
The French admire the garden; I think it paltry, and the more so from its unmeaning length, extended to the observatory. Time, however, will improve it, by changing into trees the little sticks which now border the walks.
The court of the Palais Bourbon, or of the Corps Legislatif, does not at all satisfy my eye. The portico, and indeed, all the ornamental architecture, is too small in proportion to the mass which backs it. The pilasters are straggling, and this gives an appearance of littleness to the whole. On the opposite front, the grand portico wants depth; it seems a mere screen; and the middle door at least, ought to have had twice its present dimensions. The details of the mouldings and ornaments are but indifferent. I have heard it observed that the flight of steps is too high, and diminishes the apparent size of the columns; this may be true, but on the other hand, when a portico is extended to twelve columns, the composition will want height, and a lofty basement becomes necessary. Perhaps the architect would have done better to have used only ten columns in the same extent, and making them larger, brought them down to the first flight of steps. When an artist, instead of inventing new combinations, merely adopts the form of an ancient Corinthian temple, one has a right to expect that his attention should be peculiarly directed to just proportion, and beautiful ornament; but at the same time, this simple arrangement is so elegant in itself, and so rarely exhibited, that we must feel obliged to the artist who designed it, for having sacrificed the praise of ingenious novelty, to give so noble an example of the ancient form. If the opposite Temple of Glory, or Church of the Madelaine, should ever be completed, the assemblage of fine architecture presented to the eye from the Place Louis XV. could hardly be matched in the world.
One of the most boasted modern buildings in Paris is the École de Médecine. I do not much admire it; the front screen is overloaded by the high story resting on the columns; and within the court the range of smaller columns, running behind those of the portico, has a disagreeable effect. There is a complete entablature to the smaller order, but only the cornice of the portico is continued round the building, without architrave or frieze: as the entablature is always supposed to indicate the principal construction of the roof, this arrangement is preposterous. Sometimes, where the upper story is a mere attic, it may be supposed to be in fact in the roof, and the entablature will of course be below it. Palladio, and many Italian architects, consider the entablature as indicating floors, as well as the roof, but no theory will admit its introduction in the former case and its omission in the latter.
The Fountain in front is one of the erections of Napoleon, and certainly does no honour to his taste, or that of his architect: a semicircular recess for a shower of rain, with some columns in front, is its best appearance; but usually we see no indication of water, except the green vegetation it produces; and the adjuncts are as poor as the principal object.
The Palais Royal I have already mentioned. The Hotel de Ville has a certain richness of appearance, although it is not in a style of architecture capable of great merit, and even not one of the best examples of the sort. It is, however, as good as our Guildhall.
The Halle aux Blés is justly cited as one of the finest productions of modern art; not for its beauty, to which it has no claim, but for the simple and scientific construction of its noble iron roof; each rib is composed of two bars to form its depth, and a third is added towards the springing. These bars are united by cross bars, radiating from the centre of the circle, and this constitutes the whole of the supporting work; a net of square iron framing rests upon these ribs, and supports the plates of the roof; the diameter of this dome is 142 feet.
Napoleon ordered the erection of several Abattoirs, (i. e. places for slaughtering cattle, and for the wholesale meat market,) in the outskirts of the city, but within the barrières; these are not yet finished; they are very spacious and well disposed, but the one which I visited seemed to be placed too high to admit of a plentiful supply of water. I did not perceive any thing particularly good in the construction, but in the covering there were some experiments which deserve notice. They have used in some parts the Italian semicylindrical tiles, and seem very well satisfied with them, as forming a very light and perfectly water-tight roofing. It is not, however, quite correct to call them semicylindrical, as they are, in fact, the halves of frustra of hollow cones, the lower series being laid with the concave side upwards, and the upper with the concave side downwards, and covering the joints of the lower series. We seem in our pantiles to have aimed at uniting two of these tiles into a serpentine shape, and employing only one series. The chief object of this change arises from the want of a convenient method of fixing the upper tiles. In the Abattoirs these are not fixed, except by the cement, and no inconvenience has resulted in the two years which have elapsed since they were completed. In some cases the rafters are cut into triangular prisms, with the flat side downwards, and the lower tile lies very snugly in the intervals; but for this arrangement, either the tiles must be very large, or the rafters placed very close together. In others the lower tiles were made in the shape of trays, but it was found that the water did not run off as well from the flat surface as from the hollow, and consequently, that a sharper pitch was needful.
Paris is adorned with a number of fountains, many of which, it is true, are poor and paltry, but others are very handsome, and contribute much to the ornament of the city. Among these the ‘Fontaine des Innocens’ is the most admired, and is certainly one of the most beautiful little things in Paris. It was originally placed at the angle of a street; now it is quite insulated, and I conceive, looks better in its new situation than it could have done in the old one. A square building, perforated each way by an arch standing on a basement, and crowned with a dome, forms the whole composition, and though not without faults, it is truly a valuable production; the architect was Lescot, the author of part of the Louvre.