There was some private building in the Paris of the 1790s and early 1800s before public building eventually revived at Napoleon’s fiat. Typical and partly extant is the Rue des Colonnes, most probably by N.-A.-J. Vestier (1765-1816), although sometimes attributed to Poyet, who may have had some urbanistic control. This has an open arcade at the base carried on Greek Doric columns, here very modestly scaled, and cold flat walls above that are almost without any detailing whatever. This Paris street, as much as the arcaded ones of medieval and Renaissance Italy, may well have been the prototype for Napoleon’s first and greatest urbanistic project, the work of his favourite architects Charles Percier (1764-1838) and P.-F.-L. Fontaine (1762-1853). From his acquisition of La Malmaison in 1799 he kept them busy remodelling the interiors of his successive residences as First Consul and Emperor but rarely gave them new buildings to erect. This extensive planning scheme includes the Rue de Castiglione, running south out of the Place Vendôme, the Rue and Place des Pyramides, and the Rue de Rivoli facing the Tuileries Gardens. This last street was eventually extended to the east well beyond the Louvre by Napoleon III. The opening of the Rue de Castiglione was ordered in 1801; construction began the next year, and the execution of the rest went on, with long interruptions, for more than half a century. Percier and Fontaine’s façades are characteristic of Romantic Classicism in their coldness of detailing and their infinite repetition of the same formula; but their Italianism, thin and dry though it is, recalls the plates in _Maisons et palais de Rome moderne_, which the two architects had published in 1798 before their professional star had risen very high (Plate 6B). With Nash’s Cronkhill, although in a very different and even opposed spirit, this scheme presages the international Renaissance Revival of the second quarter of the century. The very effective high curved roofs, filling out completely the ‘envelope’ allowed by the Paris building code, were added in 1855; more conventional two-pitched mansards were provided originally. But the Empire mode, particularly as elaborated by Percier and Fontaine in the service of the Emperor, was primarily a fashionable style for interiors, and found perhaps its most characteristic expression in furniture, usually of dark mahogany with much ornate decoration of a character resembling gold embroidery on uniforms. Such flat decorative work is also found carved on exteriors, not only in France but wherever Napoleonic influence penetrated. Indeed in furniture and interior design generally non-French work is often of the highest quality, especially when executed for such clients as Napoleon’s sister Caroline Murat at Naples.