The Palais de Justice is not a handsome building; the architecture of the wings is disproportionately small; they are not well connected with the centre; and the openings are everywhere too large. There are the materials of good architecture, but not well proportioned, nor well put together. It is very possible to spend a great deal of money to make a building beautiful, and utterly to fail, without any gross fault being committed; a truth of which many edifices both in France and our own country bear witness, and this among the rest. The inside is not better than the out, and the great hall, formed by a double vault supported on piers running down the middle, does no honour to the architect.
The Palace of the Luxembourg has a sort of ambiguous merit which it is difficult to understand. There is certainly something good in it, but I cannot undertake to define what that something is. Without dwelling on the rusticated columns and pilasters, repeated on each story, and the awkward manner in which the windows are inserted in the lower arches, we may observe, that the sort of half correspondence between the open arches of the gallery in the Rue Tournon, and the windowed arches of the elevated pavilions, is disagreeable; and that the central building is too trifling for the extent of the edifice. It would form a pleasing centre to the gallery only, supposing the pavilions taken entirely away. Or if the pavilions remain (with the loss, however, of the roof), an unbroken line of gallery would be better than one divided by this central elevation. On entering, the galleries to the right and left have a fine effect, which, however, is rather lost when we mount the little staircase to the galleries of painting: the rooms in which the paintings are exposed are not handsome. One of the finest of the internal parts of this building is probably the great staircase to the Chambre des Pairs. The paintings of Rubens you have heard enough of; they are rich and splendid, and that is all; the subjects are foolish, and the figures, for the most part, disgusting. Those of Vernet are good views, but one goes away and forgets them. There are some other works of the French school, of which those of Le Sueur and of Philippe de Champagne are the best.[15]