Up to the Rond Point, the Champs Élysées is flanked by parked areas on either side and decorated by fountains and other features designed by Hittorff (see Chapter 3). At the Rond Point there are a few very sumptuous _hôtels particuliers_, but beyond that the avenue was built up—or more accurately, for the most part, would eventually be built up—like a very broad boulevard flanked by large blocks of flats with shops and cafés below. In the open area on the left between the main axis, the river, and the new quarter which had taken its name ‘François I’ from Biet’s house, lay the Jardin d’Hiver of 1847 and the Palais de l’Industrie of 1853-4. Here also is the Rotonde des Panoramas of 1857 by G.-J.-A. Davioud (1823-81). Around the Arc de l’Étoile, at the far end of the Champs Élysées, are ranged pairs of dignified houses; these were designed by Hittorff with the collaboration of Rohault de Fleury in 1855 and executed in 1857-8 in a mode so academic as to be almost a revival of the _style Louis XVI_ (Plate 7). The general layout of the _place_ was determined by Haussmann, expanding a much earlier scheme of Hittorff’s. What is most notable in all this mid-nineteenth-century construction along the main axis of the city is the continuity of taste between the Second Empire period and the period that preceded it. The only real echo of the New Louvre was in the big private houses set back from the Rond Point. The Avenue de l’Opéra, extending north-westward from the Place du Théâtre Français, has become, since its completion in 1878, the major cross axis, rather than the earlier Boulevard Sébastopol to the east. The Place de l’Opéra, with a short spur of the avenue at its south end, was laid out in 1858; and the façades of the buildings (Plate 70C) around it began to go up in 1860 from the designs of Rohault de Fleury[187] and Henri Blondel (1832-97). The Opéra[188] (more properly Académie Nationale de Musique)—after the New Louvre the most conspicuous product of the Second Empire—was begun in 1861 from the design with which J.-L.-C. Garnier (1825-98), a pupil of Lebas who also worked briefly for Viollet-le-Duc, won the second competition held in that year. Although the Garnier design is often thought to be particularly characteristic of the taste of the Imperial couple, it was actually very unpopular with the Empress Eugénie; she had expected the project of her friend Viollet-le-Duc to be accepted and was furious when it failed to win. Substantially completed externally by 1870, the Opéra was not finally finished and opened until January 1875, so that neither Napoleon III nor Eugénie ever entered it.