Renaissance design, and after remarking that the architects of this time have resorted to various devices for overcoming the difficulties arising from the lack of harmony between design and construction ("entre la mode d'architecture et les convenances"), which, he says, have occasioned them much torment, he exclaims (p. 376): "Voilà cependant oú conduit l'oubli des principes vrais." It is indeed far into devious paths that the architect is led by departure from the true principles of design.
A few remarks on the church architecture of the French Renaissance may be added here. It was natural that in church architecture the mediæval structural forms should largely survive. The French people could not adopt those semi-classic basilican forms of building that were natural to Italy. Thus, while now professing to despise their own noble Gothic art, they still retained through the sixteenth century the later Gothic structural system with no essential modification. This is well illustrated in the church of St. Eustache in Paris, which was begun as late as 1532. It is a very large cruciform Gothic structure, with double aisles and a range of side chapels, overlaid with Renaissance details. Pilasters and entablatures, variously distorted in order to fit them to the Gothic proportions and functions, take the place of vaulting shafts and string courses in the interior of the nave, while on the outside similar members are used with less distortion because of a different division of the stories giving proportions more nearly agreeing with those of classic art. The chapels opening out of the outer aisles have only half the height of these aisles, and thus the exterior has two stories where there is but one inside. An entablature crowns each of these stories, and the upper one has a pseudo-Doric character. The buttresses above the chapels have two superimposed orders of pilasters, and are crowned with urns on pedestals. Thus was a frankly Gothic structure made agreeable to the French taste of the sixteenth century by a barbarous misapplication of mixed and distorted classic details.
The persistence of Gothic structural forms is shown further in the church of St. Etienne du Mont, begun in 1517. In the parts belonging to the original construction almost no classic details occur. It is Flamboyant Gothic of a peculiar type in which vaulting of almost true Gothic form is sustained by plain
