The new style, however, was perfectly adapted to the new life of secular supremacy, and, with few exceptions, both here in eastern France and in Flanders and Brabant and the Netherlands, the great civic monuments and the innumerable châteaux of an expanding and ripening society are couched in its beautiful and elaborate terms. Essentially it is a mode of ornament, containing no new element in organism, but always beautiful and, in France at all events, marked always by delicate and admirable taste. With its flame-like tracery, its complicated pinnacles, its scaffoldings of intricate latticework; with its curved and aspiring lines, glimmering niches, pierced parapets, open-work spires, and its tangled foliage, dainty filigree-work and sculptured lace, it is a marvel of imagination, dramatic sense, and consummate craftsmanship. Sometimes it is strikingly competent in its composition, as in the transepts of Beauvais and the front of Troyes, the latter being in its unfulfilled promise (it is only a beginning) one of the great façades of France, but frequently its greatest weakness is forgetfulness of consistency in a passion for beauty of line and light and shade that became almost insane. With the beginning of the sixteenth century the new art began slowly to decay in ecclesiastical buildings, but it continued for at least another hundred years in châteaux and civic work, and it is this in particular that is now disappearing through a war waged by unprecedented methods and in accordance with principles (if we may call them such) which hitherto have been found associated only with barbarian invasions or the frenzies of a mad anarchy that has called itself Revolution. For the more distinguished châteaux we must go outside our chosen field, to the Loire, Touraine, or to other parts of France where the devastation of past wars and revolutions is less complete. There is Pierrefonds, of course, if one cares for that sort of thing, but of authentic castles of the sixteenth century there are few of notable quality, though many minor farms and manors still remained in August, 1914. Ecouen and Chantilly are exceptions, and the latter, given to the nation by the Duc d’Aumale when he was exiled by the republic for the crime of belonging to the legitimate line of kings, is a good example of the princely buildings of the Renaissance when the last fires of Gothic spirit were dying away.