In any case the character of real Gothic architecture in France, as in most other European countries, made unlikely a programme of revival based chiefly on parish churches in the way of Pugin’s. The Continental Middle Ages had most notably produced cathedrals, and it was for new churches of near-cathedral scale that the re-use of Gothic was likely to be proposed. Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours, built by J.-E. Barthélémy (1799-1868) in 1840-7 on the heights of Ste Cathérine above Rouen, opens the serious phase of the Revival in France. It has a superb site and is best appreciated from a considerable distance, but the silhouette is not happy and the execution is rather hard and cold. Saint-Nicholas at Nantes was begun in 1839 just before the Rouen church by L.-A. Piel (1808-41), a confused Romantic character who died a monk, and taken over in 1843 by J.-B.-A. Lassus (1807-57), a pupil of Lebas and Henri Labrouste. It is very hard to accept this church as even in part the production of Lassus, the erudite archaeologist who brought out in 1842 the first volume of a major monograph on Chartres Cathedral and who undertook in 1845, together with the better-known E.-E. Viollet-le-Duc (1814-79), the restoration of Notre-Dame in Paris after sharing with Duban the responsibility for restoring the Sainte-Chapelle. Rather more plausible—at least in the sense that it merges fairly successfully with the original fourteenth-century nave to which it is attached—is the façade of Saint-Ouen at Rouen built in 1845-51 by H.-C.-M. Grégoire (1791-1854), a pupil of Percier. Sainte-Clotilde was finally begun in 1846, as has been noted, and completed after Gau’s death by Ballu in 1857 (Plate 55B). This ambitious urban church of cathedral scale lacks almost as completely as those just mentioned the personal qualities of design and the integrity of revived medieval craftsmanship that give character, if not always distinction, to the churches of Pugin, Carpenter, and other leading English Gothic Revivalists of the forties. Nor does it have the grandeur of proportion of Scott’s Nikolaikirche in Hamburg, to which it is more comparable in size and pretension (Plate 52B). The style is Rayonnant, or French fourteenth-century, and the material good freestone, but deadly mechanical and quite characterless in the detailing. The parts seem somehow too large for the whole. Ballu’s west towers, for example, are excessively tall for so stubby a plan, and the chapel-surrounded chevet is too elaborate for even an urban parish church.