Espérandieu’s Neo-Baroque Palais Longchamps at Marseilles has been mentioned (Plate 70A). Also at Marseilles is the enormous Romanesco-Byzantine cathedral of 1852-93, which was designed by the younger Vaudoyer (Léon, 1803-72), a pupil of his father and also of Lebas. Espérandieu became _inspecteur_ on the job in 1858 and carried on the work after Vaudoyer’s death. This is hardly superior to Ballu’s Paris churches, much less to Vaudremer’s or even Abadie’s, but it is more striking plastically in its rather redundant combination of domed west towers, crossing dome, and transeptal domes; it is also exceptionally colouristic for France. There is an almost High Victorian Gothic brashness in the treatment of the exterior walls with bands of alternately white and green stone. Here the aggressive assurance of the period speaks with an even louder voice than at the New Louvre and the Paris Opéra; this assurance is echoed, moreover, near by in Espérandieu’s own high-placed church of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde of 1854-64, a scenic accent of the most brazen Second Empire vulgarity. The Marseilles Exchange, however, dominating its own tree-lined square, is rather similar to the Chamber of Commerce in the Cannebière as it rises among ranges of houses that are more Provençal than Parisian in the modesty of their painted stucco fronts. Originally begun in 1842 by Penchaud, the Exchange was largely built in 1852-60 by his pupil Coste, but its style remains _Louis Philippe_ rather than Second Empire. The great elaboration and consequent expensiveness of Second Empire modes of design, as generally executed in France in fine freestone, restricted their full exploitation to the capital and the largest provincial cities. There is a sort of economic striation, from the immense sums the Emperor and, after him, the authorities of the Third Republic—even though relatively impoverished—were willing to put into representational public construction at the top, through the level represented by what Parisian investors spent on blocks of flats or rich provincial cities on their principal monuments, down finally to the niggardly building budgets of small towns and villages. This striation provides a sort of analogue to the breakdown of that earlier stylistic unity which had been so marked and happy a characteristic of French architecture for at least a century and a half. That this breakdown was still relative in France is apparent when one turns to other countries where eclectic taste in this period was bolder and where the variation in expenditure on different sorts of buildings was at least as great.