Of the architectural work of De l’Orme little is now extant, and the most of that which has survived has suffered such alterations that we can form from the monuments themselves but an imperfect idea of their original aspect. We have, however, in the fragments that remain, in Du Cerceau’s prints, and in the illustrations to his own writings, enough to show that he was a man with little artistic genius, though he had an ardent passion for architecture as he understood it.[129] He was among those architects of his time who went to Rome to study the antique, and he tells us in his book[130] that he dug about their foundations, and made drawings and measurements. His most important work was the palace of the Tuileries, begun in 1564. Of this gigantic scheme only a small part, the central part on the garden side, was completed by De l’Orme, and this was much altered by successive architects before the building was destroyed in 1871. The plan, as given by Du Cerceau (Fig. 119), is symmetrical, but it is broken by projecting bays and angle pavilions more pronounced than those of the Louvre. These features, survivals of the mediæval plan, distinguish the French Renaissance architecture from that of Italy to the last. [Illustration: FIG. 119.--Plan of the Tuileries, from Du Cerceau.] [Illustration: FIG. 120.--Tuileries, from Du Cerceau.] The external façade (Fig. 120) has a single story with an attic of broken outline, and in it the architect made use of a peculiar form of Ionic column of which he speaks[131] as follows: “I make here a short digression to speak of the Ionic columns which I have employed in the above-mentioned palace of her Majesty the Queen Mother.[132] ... The said columns are sixty-four in number on the side facing the garden, and each one is two feet in diameter at the base. They are not all of one piece, since I could not find so large a number of such height as was necessary.... I have fashioned them as you see (Fig. 121), and with suitable ornaments to hide the joints; which is an invention that I have never yet seen in any edifice either ancient or modern, and still less in our books of architecture. I remember to have made nearly the same in the time of his late Majesty Henry II, in his château of Villers Cotterets, in the doorway of a chapel which is in the park, and it was very graceful, as you may judge from the figure which I give.” Further on he proposes that this shall be called the French order, saying: “If it was allowable for the architects of antiquity, in different nations and countries, to invent new columns, as the Romans invented the Tuscan and the Composite, the Athenians the Athenian, and, long before the said Romans, those of Doris the Doric, of Ionia the Ionic and Corinthian, who shall forbid us Frenchmen from inventing some, and calling them French, as those might be called which I have invented and used in the porch of the chapel of Villers Cotterets?” Of