Much of this is common to the projects of Boullée, more widely known than Ledoux’s in the eighties because of his many pupils. The simple geometrical forms, the plain surfaces, the reiterative handling of minor features, all are even more conspicuous in his designs and generally presented at a scale so grand as to approach megalomania (Plate 2C). Boullée could be, and often was, more conventionally the Classical Revivalist than Ledoux; he was also perhaps somewhat less bold in using such shapes as the sphere cube and the pyramid. His inspiration was on occasion medieval (of a very special South European ‘Castellated’ order), and he thereby laid the foundations for that more widely eclectic use of the forms of the past which makes the Romantic Classical a syncretic style, not a mere revival of Roman or Greek architecture. Various projects of the eighties by younger men, such as Bernard Poyet (1742-1824) and L.-J. Desprez (1743-1804), of whom we will hear again later, were of very similar character. Both Boullée and Ledoux, but particularly Ledoux, were interested in symbolism. In that sense their architecture was not essentially abstract, despite the extreme geometrical simplicity of their forms, but in their own term _parlante_ or expressive and meaningful. So special and personal is most of their symbolism, however, that even when quite obvious, as with the ‘Coopery’, it was hardly viable for other architects. When Ledoux gave to his _Oikema_ or ‘House of Sexual Education’ an actual _plan_ of phallic outline (which would be wholly unnoticeable except from the air) he epitomized the hermetic quality of much of his architectural speech. It is understandable that, of the many who accepted his architectural syntax, very few really attempted to speak his language. Such symbolism belonged on the whole to an early stage of Romantic Classicism; after 1800 architectural speech was generally of a much less recondite order. Yet to each of the different vocabularies employed by Romantic Classicists—Grecian, Egyptian, Italian, Castellated, etc.—some sort of special meaning was commonly attached. Thus a restricted and codified eclecticism provided, as it were, the equivalent of a system of musical keys that could be chosen according to a conventional code when designing different types of buildings.