The work of Paul Abadie was not appreciated by some academics in the mid-twentieth century, as they felt he was fanciful, destroyed much Romanesque heritage, and had no compunction about adding whimsical sculptures of his own manufacture on capitals and corbels. An example of his willful implantations of false Romanesque sculpture is to be found in the clover-leaf church of St Michel d'Entraygues near Angoulême. Here, he has introduced a capital featuring a triple-headed Green Man with horns and a diabolical expression. Despite its intriguing shape, this small church has no connection with the Templars, but was built to receive pilgrims on the way to Compostela. Abadie's restoration works at
Périgueux Cathedral Many communities in the present-day Charente and Dordogne departments are indebted to him for the restoration of a large number of ecclesiastical buildings, many that were in severe disrepair or simply neglected over centuries, for example in Angoulême, Périgueux, and Cahors, where from 1849 onwards he was the diocesan architect for those dioceses. His works, in particular Sacré Cœur, inspired many devotional and pilgrimage basilicas, for example the
Basilica of the Sacred Heart, Brussels, (Koekelberg), 1919–1960, by Albert van Huffel, or the basilica Sainte-Thérèse de Lisieux, 1928–1954, by Louis-Marie Cordonnier. He also inspired a large number of churches, most notably in Paris (
Saint-Esprit, 1928–1935, by
Paul Tournon; Saint-Pierre-de-Chaillot, 1931–1938, by Émile Bois; and Sainte-Odile, 1934–1946, by Jacques Barge). ==References==