Here, at its heart, the contrast between setting and monument in Second Empire Paris is at its most extreme, even though this setting is far richer and more plastic than that provided by the severely flat houses that surround the Arc de l’Étoile. Just as there, however, the use of a giant order on all the big blocks that form the _place_ reveals the distinctly academic taste of the leading French architects in this period; but Blondel’s rounded pavilions, where two major streets come in on either side at an angle, provide an almost Baroque elaboration in the grouping of the various masses by which the complex space is defined (Plate 70C). Certainly the result is very different from the large open areas surrounded by discrete blocks of plain geometrical shape favoured by Romantic Classicism. The Opéra is sumptuous in a rather different way from the New Louvre (Plate 70B). Yet in Garnier’s work, as in Lefuel’s, a generically Neo-Baroque effect is achieved with elements mostly High Renaissance in origin, but here Italian rather than French. The richly coloured marbles, the admirably placed sculpture by Carpeaux, and above all the fashion in which the masses pile up—from the ornate colonnade crowning the main façade, through the half-dome which expresses the auditorium externally, to the tall stage-house at the rear—is much richer plastically than the somewhat repetitive scheme of the New Louvre. The whole, moreover, is made fully three-dimensional by the comparable organization of the major elements at the sides and on the rear. Thus Garnier provided a visual equivalent to the complex ordering of his extremely elaborate plan, a plan the undoubted virtues of which can be fully appreciated only on paper (Figure 15). Inside the Opéra the great staircase, the foyer, and the actual auditorium drip with somewhat brassy gold and the profusion of detail has a curiously un-Renaissance spikiness and lumpiness (Plate 71). This quality underlines how un-archaeological was Garnier’s approach, how responsive he was (perhaps unconsciously) to the new tastes of the mid century that had produced the High Victorian[189] Gothic in England in the previous decade and fostered generally the international success of the Second Empire mode. When Eugénie asked him what the ‘style’ of the Opéra was—_Louis XIV_, _Louis XV_, _Louis XVI_—he replied with both tact and accuracy: ‘C’est du Napoléon III’.