Soon after Alexander’s accession in 1801 he called on a less distinguished French architect, Thomas de Thomon (1754-1813), to design the Petersburg Bourse[35] for him; this structure, built in 1804-16, not Brongniart’s slightly later Bourse in Paris, is the great, indeed almost the prime, monument of Romantic Classicism around 1800 (Plate #8A:pl008A). The blank pediment, rising from behind a colonnade, the great segmental lunette lighting the interior, the flanking rostral columns, the smooth stucco so crisply painted, all establish this as a perfect exemplar of this period, even though every idea in it can be found in projects, if not in executed work, by Ledoux and Boullée dating from before the Revolution. An even more precise prototype is provided by a project for a ‘Bourse Maritime’ by Pompon that won a second Grand Prix de Rome in 1798; this was not published until 1806, after Thomon had begun his Bourse, but he was probably familiar with it all the same. Not only is the Bourse exemplary in itself; Petersburg—already a century old and with many vast Baroque palaces to its credit—rather than the newly founded city of Washington on the other side of the western world, offers the finest urban entity of this brief period and of the following decades during which Alexander and his brother Nicholas I continued for some thirty years major campaigns of construction along Romantic Classical lines. Thomon’s chief Russian rival, Nikiforovich Voronikhin (1760-1814), was French-trained, a pupil of de Wailly. His Kazan Cathedral at Petersburg of 1801-11 is still rather Baroque in its obvious reminiscences of St Peter’s in Rome. But the Academy of Mines, which he began ten years later, although somewhat heavy-handed in the way Romantic Classicism tended to be, away from the great cultural centres, is almost as exemplary as Thomon’s Bourse. More characteristically Russian in its incredible extension and the great variety of its silhouette is the Admiralty[36] of 1806-15 by Adrian Dimitrievich Zakharov (1761-1811). But the end façades successfully enlarged to monumental scale the theme of the arched entrance to the pre-revolutionary Hôtel de Salm in Paris by Pierre Rousseau (1751-1810). Altogether the Admiralty exceeded in quality as well as in scale almost everything that Napoleon commanded to be built in France, except perhaps the Arc de l’Étoile.