The Sun.
London, England, 1863-12-01 00:00:00

Napoleon 111 's Transformation of Paris,

How much soever there may be in the existing
Government of France on which Englishmen can-
not look with satisfaction, the Saturday Review
remarks, it cannot be denied that during the last
ten years commercial advances and " strategical
exigencies" have, between them, given an impulse
to architecture in that country which has called
forth noteworthy results. Even oar insular vanity,
impervious as it is on many points alike to ridicule
and to reason, has been lately compelled at once to
admire much of what has been done in Paris and
despise most of what has been done in London.
And those who are aware of the taste and skill
which place the French, in art generally, really
and truly in their favourite position as the " leaders
of Europetin civilisation," and who remember that,
during the middle ages, they were simply the
greatest and the most inventive architects of Chris-
tendom, will be ready to believe that, amongst a
certain number of failures or partial successes, they
cannot have half rebuilt the main streets of their
capital without producing much which may well
make us blush for Tyburnia and Kensington, for
what has been done in Cromwell-road, and for what
is doing in Downing-street. We will give but one
example here, but it shall be a decisive one. It is
enough to look at their Exhibition Building—at
once graceful, massive, appropriate, and original—
and at the huge block which so unaccountably lin-
gers of our own, and to recognise our superiors.
Whilst, however, we confess all this to the fall,
we are not at all disposed to hold up the recent
works, in Paris and elsewhere, as either thoroughly
satisfactory in themselves or as models for our in-

sanction. Things daring the last ten years
have been done too rapidly, and on too large
a scale to admit of that thoughtful study and
careful execution which aro at the bottom of good

work in architecture as in everything else. Per-
haps the very best of the modern houses of Paris,
such as those engraved by Mr. Fergusson in the
volume which we cannot recommend too often to
our readers' notice, are amongst those erected at the
beginning of the period of reconstruction. It is im-
possible to escape the conviction that, since that
time, the architects, skilful and thorough as they
are, have been overtasked ; although even a hasty
survey shows that they rarely produce anything ab•
solutely tame, and, it need hardly be said, never fall
into that mindless commonplace, that fixed and
deeply-seated clumsiness, which the barbarous
builders to whom our contractors apparently en-
trust the new regions of London seems as little able
to escape from as to be sensible of.

We will name a few noticeable specimens, in the
hope that readers who happen to visit Paris may be
induced to examine them, and then, recalling for a
moment Belgrave-square, or Queen's-gate, orAlbert-
road, or Westbourne-terrace—anything and every-
thing in short that has been built on a system in our
ugly capital—may ask whether our criticism be riot
only too just. Such are the Restaurant de la Belle
Gabrielle, the corner house of the Rue Nicolas
Flamel (elegant), and the Maison Tour (more severe)
—all instanceslin the best part of the Rue Rivoli.
No. 43, Boulevart de Sebastopol (rive gauche), and

the corner house of the Rue Rinmur and Rue S
Martin, exhibit graceful and original treatment o
the balcony; No. 10 in the other half of the Sebes.

topol Boulevart is an instance of the felicitous ma-
nagement of pilasters. It would be easy to treble
our list. Almost everywhere we find some at least
of what may be called the fundamental principles
of domestic architecture followed—elegant and
varied decoration, individuality of design (few
houses being absolutely like their neighbours), and,
so far as strikes the eye, truthful and solid construc-
tion. Where a space has to be bridged ever, as in
the windows of a shop, the French architect either
throws an arch at once, which is certainly the most
satisfactory mode to the eye and the stablest for the
building, or he makes the upper line of the shop-
front fiat, and places a graceful low window be-
neath the arch, which then spans two stories. In
England we generally have a dead uniformity of
uglinesf., each house as like all the rest oh the row as if,
the Demon of Monotony had cast them in a mould
whilst, even in our more elaborate attempts the front
wall of a shop almost always appears to rest on
sheets of plate-glass, the real supports being a couplo
of thin iron columns, which the builder absurdly
tries to conceal. Our decorations are either absolutely
nothing—the bald wall and the square hole—or vary
between the eternal triangular pediment and bracket
heading, and the diseased efflorescence of badly-
modelled garland which breaks out in the neigh-
bourhood of Queen's Gate, or in the Victoria Ter-
minus hotel. Of the materials which nature has
given us we make, in nineteen cases outoftwe
envteyn,
no appreciable use whatever.
We
cannot
surface ; we
bake our excellent clays to a
lusting
°earth
into
unuout modely formbutthe anm ill sphlaaps plastic
unmb substance a
plasterere
and painter,for thenthwi
tphe—r s
na dpe
places
ue
es
thatn leaguebricksliothokthegihoooumsye
of facing the wall with one of the endless varieties
of bright and durable plaster—daubs it with
a dismal gray, which must henceforth be smeared
with white lead every other year, like a door or a
cupboard. A marble facade would, We believe, in
fifty years (and fifty years are the youth of a house),
prove a cheaper thing than this abominable arrange-
ment.

People in France would not put up with such
shabby work as this. They prove it in the best
possible way, by doing the contrary. It is no won-
der that their universal verdict, when they come to
London, should be a condemnation of its ugliness.
Provoking and humiliating as this is, or uught to
be, to us, it is more humiliating still to be forced to
allow that the cause is mainly our own want of taste