It is not worth while to follow this phase of the French Renaissance art much further, but Du Cerceau gives one other design that is worthy of a moment’s attention for its freakish irrationality and, I will not hesitate to say, ugliness, the project for the château of Charleval, begun for Charles IX, but not far advanced in construction at the time of his death, and never completed. The exterior façade of the _basse-court_ is divided into a long series of bays (Fig. 125) by colossal rusticated pilasters of two orders, embracing the two stories into which the elevation, above the basement, is divided. Each pilaster is crowned with a section of an architrave and frieze, in the form of a ressaut of two orders, which interpenetrates the bed mouldings of the continuous cornice. Since the architrave and frieze are not carried along the intervening walls, the pilasters have no real entablature to support even in appearance. Another unmeaning freak of design in this façade is the kind of variation of the details of the several bays which it exhibits. The rectangular windows are in one bay surmounted with round archivolts, in the next with curved pediments, in another with angular pediments above and curved ones below, in another with curved pediments above and round archivolts below, in still another with curved pediments above and a single one embracing both windows below; and so on with continued change with no purpose but that of mere change.[141] Viollet le Duc[142] commends the architect of this façade for seeking what he calls a grand disposition without abandoning the logical principles of his predecessors. But the great French master appears to me to err in his reasoning here, as frequently elsewhere in his discourse on the architecture of the Renaissance. The great order of Doric pilasters used in this façade fills, he says, exactly the function of buttresses, and he then proceeds to defend the whole scheme by saying that, “Taking the order as a buttress it is possible, without violence to reason, to cut it by a floor” (_i.e._ to divide the space between the pilasters into two stories). But there is no sense in taking the order as a buttressing system, for there is nothing in the structure to require buttressing; and if there were, the pilasters of an order, even though doubled, as in this case, would not form an effective buttress system. It is in nothing but the general arrangement of the main lines that such a composition can be said to bear any resemblance to an organic mediæval system in which buttresses have a function, and are shaped so as to express it. [Illustration: FIG. 126.--Interior façade of Charleval, Du Cerceau.]