was then briefly seat of the Parliament of the Province of Canada in 1852–1854, but it was fully destroyed in a fire on February 1, 1854, among with the museum of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec and half of the collection of the parliamentary library. The area that used to be the Episcopal Palace is now part of the Parc Montmorency. Post office The Old Parliament Building destroyed, the legislature was left with no building to operate in. They quickly accepted the offer of the Sisters of Charity to rent their convent as a temporary seat of parliament, but on May 3, 1854, during works on repurposing the building, another fire ruined the new wing of the house they intended to use as a meeting place for the legislature. They afterwards rented a courthouse and a music hall as an emergency solution, until in 1858, the city acquired the ground with the ruins of the Old Parliament Building (it later became the Champlain Market). The proceeds were then used to construct a small building first intended as a post office, but then it was decided to move the legislature and the government there instead. The Canadian legislature presided in the office from 1860 to 1865, and, after Confederation, the provincial parliament occupied the building from 1867 to 1883, when it succumbed to a fire. Construction of the current building The government sought a bigger place to operate, in one building, thus the government proposed to build a new site in 1869. For this purpose, it bought lands that were occupied by a Jesuit college and demolished it in 1872. It also bought a parcel of land from the federal government in July 1876 for that purpose, and it is on these two lots of land that the new building, which was to host the government (including ministries), the legislature and the lieutenant governor's office, was constructed. The design works were assigned to Eugène-Étienne Taché, an architect who was then working at the provincial ministry of public works. He chose to build a new seat for government and parliament in a building with a style harkening back to the French Renaissance, instead of the British-style architecture in Ottawa. Due to budget constraints, however, the building's Second Empire architecture was toned down somewhat from what was popular in Paris; it was nevertheless called "construction of the century", with up to