The High Victorian Gothic episode in American architecture balanced almost precisely the Second Empire episode. Both were disowned, even by many of their most successful protagonists, by the mid seventies. It was the Gothic, however, that prepared the way for the more original developments of the last quarter of the century; as has already been stated, those who had practised chiefly in the Second Empire mode continued to take their lead from Paris. Yet there are paradoxes in the situation which must not be ignored. Richardson, the most creative new force in the seventies and eighties, continually urged young aspirants to an architectural career to study at the École des Beaux-Arts as he had done. Charles F. McKim (1847-1909), Richardson’s first really able assistant, was Paris-trained; partly because of that training, it was he who became in the mid eighties the leader of the reaction against the Richardsonian. Sullivan, the first truly great modern architect not alone of America but of the whole western world, was also in part Paris-trained, even though he was always highly critical of the doctrine of the École and much stimulated by Furness. Finally, it was even more the later writings of the French Viollet-le-Duc than those of the English Ruskin that encouraged bold and imaginative thinking about architecture in America in the seventies and eighties when his _Entretiens_ became available in translation and were first widely read.[252] Were this a history of architectural thought rather than of architecture—that is of what was actually _built_ in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—Viollet-le-Duc would play a much larger part. But his production,[253] while not negligible, is curiously ambiguous. His many ‘restorations’ are no contribution to nineteenth-century architecture; rather they represent a serious diminution of authenticity in the great monuments of the past subjected to his ministrations. These include most notably Notre-Dame in Paris, the refurbishing of which he continued alone after the death of Lassus in 1857, and the Château de Pierrefonds, Oise, the rebuilding of which began the next year and continued down to his death in 1879; but the whole list is very long indeed, including Carcassonne, Vézelay, and Saint-Denis, to mention only some of the best known things.