A viable scheme for the New Louvre was produced by the sixty-year-old Visconti with very great rapidity. Counting on the great size of the Cour du Carrousel to obscure the awkward lack of parallelism between the Louvre and the Tuileries, he planned two hollow blocks extending westward at either end of the existing western front of the old Louvre. Beyond these blocks narrower wings, in part built already, would connect with the two ends of the Tuileries Palace in which French rulers usually lived. In the middle of the court fronts of the side blocks there were to be large pavilions, echoing Le Mercier’s in the centre of the west wing of the old Louvre, and other smaller pavilions to mark the salient corners towards the Place du Carrousel. Although the new constructions were intended to house various things—two ministries, a library, stables for the Tuileries, etc.—they were designed comprehensively with no specific indication of what would go on behind the long walls and inside the various pavilions. The New Louvre was not a palace or Royal residence; but like the old Louvre, which by this time housed several disparate activities—most notably the chief art gallery of France—it was meant to be representationally palatial. In 1853 Visconti died and H.-M. Lefuel (1810-80), a pupil of Huyot, took over. Lefuel very much enriched the design and thereby provided the prime Parisian exemplar of the Second Empire mode, at least as the world outside France came to know it in the late fifties and sixties. Heavily though Lefuel leaned on the precedents provided by the various sections of the old Louvre, it is important to stress that his design did not represent, in the way of the first half of the century, a specific ‘revival’. For one thing, the old Louvre, begun by Pierre Lescot late in François I’s reign and carried forward by a succession of architects in the next four hundred years, offered a wide range of suggestions but no one consistent model. The most characteristic and striking features of the New Louvre, the corner pavilions, were those that were most eclectic in inspiration and in their total effect most nearly original (Plate 68). No part of the old Louvre is as boldly plastic as these pavilions with their rich applied orders set far forward of the wall-plane; only Le Mercier’s Pavillon de l’Horloge on the old Louvre offered precedent for the great height of all the new pavilion roofs and in particular for the convex mansards, like square domes, over the central pavilions flanking the Cour du Carrousel.