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The queen herself often walked down from the Louvre close by to see how he was getting on, and to give her opinion as to the grouping of some statues or the arrangement of a grotto; and here too came his friends when in Paris, Montmorency, Condé, Jarnac and others, and Delorme, Bullant, Filon, and all the great architects of the day.

The pavilion attributed to Jean Bullant, the western façade, the ancient Petit Chateau, the Grand Vestibule, the Grand Escalier and the Gallerie des Cerfs and a dozen other apartments are of a rare and imposing beauty, though losing somewhat their distinctive aspect by reason of the objets de musée distributed about their walls and floors.

Nos. 14 and 16, corner of the Rue de Sévigné, is the Hôtel de Carnavalet, a magnificent renaissance mansion, in raising which no less than four famous architects had part Lescot, Bullant, Du Cerceau and the elder Mansard. Her Carnavalette, as she delighted to call it, is now the civic museum of Paris.

At Henry's accession Catherine's architects, Philibert de l'Orme and Jean Bullant, had completed the superb domed central pavilion of the Tuileries, with its two contiguous galleries, and begun the end pavilions, the former using the Ionic order as a delicate flattery of Catherine, "since among the ancients that order was employed in temples dedicated to a goddess."

The Renaissance of Delorme, Bullant, Lescot, each of whom had a hand in the building of the Tuileries, expressed certain characteristic phases of architectural art in the reigns of Francis I and Henri II. The reign of Charles IX was only another phase of that long reign of Catherine de Médici, and architectural influences continued to follow along the same reminiscent Italian lines, particularly with reference to such edifices as the Médici herself caused to be built.