The return of the mansard in France is harder to document than its appearance as a new element of architectural composition in other countries, for in France it had never passed out of use as a practical device for providing usable attics. With the increasing emulation of sixteenth-century French models in the second quarter of the century tall roofs of a more medieval sort began to be used with some frequency. Biet’s ‘Maison de François I’ of 1825 did not have them; but ten years later they are very prominent on the _François I_ house Dusillion built in the Rue Vaneau. Moreover, Lesueur in the late thirties could hardly avoid their use when extending the sixteenth-century Hôtel de Ville (Plate 22A). As noted earlier, it seems to have been H.-A.-G. de Gisors, at the École Normale Supérieure built in 1841-7, who first re-introduced on a prominent building mansards of seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century character, and in association with detailing that suggests, vaguely at least, the _style Louis XIV_. By the late forties the use of such mansards was fairly common in France, although they rarely received much emphasis. Had Dusillion in 1849-51 built the mansarded mansion for T. H. Hope[180] in Paris rather than in London therefore, or the Danish-born but Paris-schooled Detlef Lienau (1818-87)[181] his mansarded Hart M. Shiff house of the same date in France rather than in America, neither would have been especially notable. But in the England and the United States of the mid century emulation of French models was in itself novel. Dusillion’s and Lienau’s mansards, moderate enough by French standards, suggested to the English and the Americans a way by which edifices of generically Renaissance character could be given something of the bold silhouette that high pointed roofs provided for Victorian Gothic structures. Like Barry’s loggia-topped towers and his corner chimneys, mansards appealed directly to the mid century’s characteristic desire to break sharply away from the flat-surfaced, and nearly flat-topped, cubic blocks of Romantic Classicism. Pavilion composition offered a similar resource for the plastic modelling of façades.