The accepted range of stylistic inspiration was so wide that it is often only a certain syncretism that gives buildings of this period, nominally in any one of half a dozen ‘styles’, a recognizably contemporary flavour. So also new methods of construction, rather than superseding masonry in toto and thereby demanding original expression as in Victor Baltard’s Central Markets, were more characteristically fused with it, as in the reading-rooms of Labrouste’s libraries. Of these only the later, that in the Bibliothèque Nationale, was built under the Second Empire (Plate 69). Except for this Salle de Travail of 1861-9 and the Magasin or stacks, both so exciting to posterity, most of Labrouste’s other work at this institution, begun in 1855, is as derivative as his private houses; for the most part it is actually hard to say where the old seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings stop and his nineteenth-century additions and those of his successor J.-L. Pascal (1837-1920) begin. Despite the increasing use of metal in all sorts of buildings, there was undoubtedly less sympathy for it than earlier, and hence less success in finding appropriate expression of its qualities (see Chapter 7). By exception, however, the Central Markets in Lyons of 1858 by Antoine Desjardins (1814-82), a pupil of Duban, have a somewhat Labrouste-like elegance in the arched and pierced metal principals spanning the three naves that is not found in Baltard’s so much larger Central Markets in Paris. In church architecture something like full eclecticism reigned in Paris under Napoleon III, although Gothic was most popular in the provinces. The new Parisian churches generally occupy focal points where major avenues join or boulevards change direction; but, like the Opéra, they have little visual relation to the sober settings provided by the blocks of flats among which they are placed. Instead, each one seems intended to illustrate an alternative mode quite different from the standard urban vernacular of the day. Saint-François-Xavier in the Boulevard Montparnasse was begun by the elderly Lusson in 1861 and finished by T.-F.-J. Uchard (1809-91) in 1875. With its basilican plan and cold Early Renaissance detail, this might well have been built under Louis Philippe. Saint-Jean-de-Belleville by Lassus, on the other hand, begun in 1854 and completed in 1859 after his death, while larger and rather better built than his churches of the forties, hardly represents any advance over Gau’s Sainte-Clotilde, completed by Ballu only two years earlier. Neo-Gothic could hardly be duller. However, Saint-Denys-de-l’Estrée (Plate 98), the parish church of the suburb of St-Denis, designed by Lassus’s associate and successor Viollet-le-Duc[193] in 1860 and built in 1864-7, is more comparable in quality to the contemporary High Victorian Gothic churches of England (see Chapter 11).