Two later churches by Lassus, Saint-Nicholas at Moulins, built in collaboration with L.-D.-G. Esmonnot (1807-80) in 1849, and Saint-Pierre at Dijon of 1853 hardly rival Sainte-Clotilde in size, elaboration, or even plausibility. Viollet-le-Duc was rather more of an executant architect than Lassus, even though in this decade and the next most of his vast energy and very considerable archaeological knowledge went into the restoration of medieval monuments. At Notre-Dame in Paris the Chapter House that he designed is a wholly new construction of 1847 not unworthy of comparison with the best work of Scott in these years. The block of flats (Plate 56) he built at 28 Rue de Berlin (now de Liège) in Paris in 1846-8—his first executed building—may better be compared with the most advanced English secular Gothic of its date, Salvin’s Peckforton, say, or Butterfield’s St Augustine’s College, Canterbury. The front is so simple and straightforward in composition that it fits between more conventional façades with no awkwardness, and the rather plain detailing has the ‘realism’ that was coming to be admired by this date in the most advanced English circles. The Romanesquoid design of Fontaine’s Chapelle-Saint-Ferdinand of 1843 has been mentioned. The use of such forms was in the forties even more exceptional in France than in England. In 1852 Didron estimated—probably with some exaggeration—that over two hundred Neo-Gothic churches had been built or were building in France, a record which compares statistically, if in no other way, with English church production in this period. None of them, however, is as impressive to later eyes as Saint-Paul at Nîmes, which follows with notable success the alternative Romanesquoid mode of Fontaine’s chapel. C.-A. Questel (1807-88), a pupil of Blouet and Duban, the architect of this church, had evidently studied the Romanesque with the care and enthusiasm usually lavished on the Gothic by his generation, and the result is so great an advance over Fontaine’s work that the resemblance is merely nominal. Thus might the Camdenians have hoped to build had they considered the twelfth-century Romanesque of France as worthy of conscientious emulation as the fourteenth-century Gothic of England. Saint-Paul is a large cruciform edifice, rib-vaulted throughout in a proto-Gothic way, and crowned with a great central lantern. The detail is plausible in its design, neither too skimpy nor too elaborate, although the execution lacks any real feeling for medieval craftsmanship in stone. Questel’s church, however, is as much of an exception as Fontaine’s chapel. No Romanesque Revival got under way in the forties in France in the way that one did to a certain extent in Germany, and the few other Romanesquoid churches of high quality belong to the next period (see Chapter 8).