sentences:  As a boy Gilles-Marie Oppenord was trained in the studio of Jules Hardouin-Mansart and was sent in 1692 to study as a royal pensioner in Rome for eight years, where he largely ignored the remains of Classical Antiquity and spent his time instead sketching the Baroque sculptural ornaments of the preceding generations, principally those carried out under Bernini and Borromini, and in northern Italy the ornament of Mannerist architects like Pirro Ligorio.Three notebooks of his youthful drawings survive.On his return to France in 1699 he failed to secure a post in the "Bâtiments du Roi".