French furniture in the middle ages and under Louis XIII

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LITTLE ILLUSTRATED BOOKS ON

OLD FRENCH FURNITURE

I. FRENCH FURNITURE IN THE
MIDDLE AGES AND UNDER
LOUIS XIII

FRENCH FURNITURE

I. French Furniture in the Middle
Ages and under Louis XIII

II. French Furniture under Louis XIV

III. French Furniture under Loujs XV

IV. French Furniture under Louis XVI

AND THE Empire

ENGLISH FURNITURE

(Previously published)

I. English Furniture under the

Tudors and Stuarts
II. English Furniture of the Queen
Anne Period

III. English Furniture of the Chippen-

dale Period
IV. English Furniture of the Sheraton
Period

Each volume profusely illustrated with

full-page reproductions and

coloured frontispieces

Crown SvOf Cloth, price 4s. 6d. net
LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD.

Cupboard in Two Parts

(Middle of the XVIth Century)

LITTLE ILLUSTRATED BOOKS ON
OLD FRENCH FURNITURE I

FRENCH FURNITURE

IN THE MIDDLE AGES
AND UNDER LOUIS XIII

BY ROGER DE FELICE

Translated by
F. M. ATKINSON

LONDON MCMXXIII

WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD.

/ OS^'i S5

First published, 1923

Printed in Great Britain hy
Woods &■ Sons, Ltd,f London, N. i.

INTRODUCTION

A CONSECUTIVE and complete history of French
furniture — complete in that it should not leave
out the furniture used by the lower middle
classes, the artisans and the peasants — remains
still to be written ; and the four little books of
this series are far from claiming to fill such a
gap. And yet they will perhaps usefully fill
their modest place by giving some hints and
ideas, as accurate as possible even though very
elementary and simple, to those who appreciate
the excellent work wrought by old-time joiners
out of walnut trees and cherry trees and oaks.

The present passion for those plain pieces of
furniture that six or eight generations of the
folk of Lorraine, of Provence, of Gascony or
Normandy have polished by use and filled with
their humble treasures, has more legitimate
foundations than the mere craze for running
after a fashion and the astute advertising of
dealers : they are practical, their solid strength
is proof against the lapse of years — if we dared,
we might say their soul is dovetailed to their
frames — their material the " bon dot's vif^ sec
loyal et marchand^' spoken of in every article
of the Statiits et ordonnances des maistres
huchiers-menuisiers^ is often most admirable.
Their lines and their naive ornamentation.

vi INTRODUCTION

despite their awkwardness, sometimes possess a
real beauty, and nearly always have a most
agreeable air. They never hide bad wood
badly put together under a pompous raiment of
ebony, tortoiseshell and brass, as do the most
authentic cabinets by Andre-Charles Boulle, or
under a glossy vermilion lacquering, like the
vaguely Chinese tables of certain furniture
mongers of to-day. What a splendid lesson
they give us, and one of which we stand greatly
in need, a lesson of good sense, and honesty, and
professional conscience !

The aforesaid statutes and ordinances make no
jest of malfeasance and bad workmanship. Let
us read over the Lettres patentes octroyees par
Henry^ Roy de France et de Pologne^^ h ses
chers et bien amez les maistres huchurs-
menuisiers de sa ville de Paris, Here are a
few of their prescripts : —

*^ The said works are to be well and duly
made, both ornaments, architecture, assemblage,
turnery, carving in the French, antique or
modern fashion, the joints well and duly observed,
fitted with tenons, pins and mortices . . . the
whole of good sound wood, honest and mer-
chantable, under penalty of ten crowns fine and
the work to be burned in front of the workman's
dwelling."

"Let none make hall sideboards, chamber
dressers, cabinets to hold rings and trinkets,
chamber tables, service tables, wooden bed for
J Jienry III, in 1580,

INTRODUCTION vil

covering with velvet, green cloth, or any other
colour or material, trestle table or other article
of furniture that shall not be v^ell and duly-
made, and the v^hole both in assemblage, turnery,
carving in the French, antique or modern
fashion, marquetry or other nev^ invention . . .
the whole of good sound wood, honest and
merchantable, under penalty of ten crowns fine
and the work to be burned in front of the
workman's dwelling."

*' Let none make chair or stool (scabelle *),
whether square, round, octagonal or triangular,
placet* low-backed chair called caqiietouere
. . . coffer legs {^pattes de bahiits) . . . that
shall not be well and duly made and assembled
with morticesand tenons."

" Let none make aumries ' to keep clothes,
papers, jewellery, plate . . . save that the feet
and cross timbers be of fitting width and
thickness."

" Let none make bread cupboard or kneading-
trough, hutch to keep bread or meat . . . strong
boxes, bureaus, counters, bancs a couches^ bancs
h dossiers . . . and other commodities within
the province of the said hutcher-joiner's trade,
for the use and profit of any and sundry persons
of whatever sort, save they be well and duly
made and assembled, with good sound wood,
honest and merchantable, upon the penalties as
hereunder."

This old wording is sufficiently quaint, and
I Cupboards.

viii INTRODUCTION

the matter exemplary enough to excuse the
length of the quotation.' What a contrast they
make with the habits that rule in too many-
workshops of to-day !

" All this is very fine and large," say certain
pessimists, ^' but this furniture makes us think of
the legendary steed of Roland : ' it has all
possible virtues, but it no longer exists — or if it
does, it comes out of the factories of the fakers. "
Indeed and indeed, fakes abound in this depart-
ment of antiques as in all the others, and it
would hardly be possible otherwise to account
for the incredible multiplication of antique shops
in the last few years. But the profession does
include honest brokers, and among the pieces
called old there are genuine antiques. Many
have long ago been swept out of sight through-
out the whole of France ; but even these must
be periodically brought into circulation through
the agency of bequests and changing fortunes.
And whatever anyone says, there is still a goodly
muster surviving among the country folk in the
depths of the provinces, except perhaps in
Normandy, Brittany, and the Aries district, and
they abound in the small towns. What pro-
vincial middle-class family of any ancientry fails

I These statutes, recast and confirmed in 1645, governed the
body of tradesmen until the suppression of the corporations in
1791, which was one of the causes that brought about the pro-
found decadence into which the art of furniture making fell from
that date. Similar statutes were in force in all the provinces ;
but the artists lodged by the king in the galleries of the Louvre,
such as BouUe, and those belonging to the royal manufactories
were not amenable to them.

INTRODUCTION ix

to preserve monumental cupboards, big-bellied
commodes, straw armchairs of the eighteenth
century, or some " twist-legged " table (hpiliers
tors) of the days of Louis XIV ? And how many
of these families of folk once rich, or at least
once comfortably well-to-do, are to-day faced
with the cruel necessity of selling these family
relics ?

Everybody who served in the field in the late
war was able to see for himself in rest billets, no
matter where they might be, how many old
pieces are still hidden in the farmhouses, in
Champagne for instance, and Lorraine, dresser-
sideboards and cupboards and other pieces in the
Louis XV or Louis XVI style, and not always
pieces of rustic make.

If a personal reminiscence may be allowed, the
writer remembers how in 1 91 8, when ''resting'*
in the Vitry-le-Frangois region, he was billeted
on an old peasant woman who, besides a side-
board of the finest patina and a very ordinary
Louis XVI commode, whose value she greatly
exaggerated, possessed a charming little piece of
the Louis XIV period in marquetry of coloured
woods, with curving counterforts, which served
as a tool-cupboard. The marble top had long
since disappeared and been replaced by rough
boards that were at that moment covered with
a thick carapace of hen's droppings ; one of the
feet, being worm-eaten, had given place to a stump
fixed by two horse-shoe nails ; but after a wash
and brush up and some discreet restoration it

6

X INTRODUCTION

could have taken its place with honour in the
most fastidious collection. And it could have
readily been bought for ten francs ! Another
time, in the heart of the ruins of Esnes, on the
Verdun front, did we not see, half consumed in
the fire by which a handful of territorials were
warming their old bones, a Regency arm-chair leg
with exquisite carving ?

It goes without saying that middle-class
furniture becomes more and more rare in pro-
portion as we look for it from earlier periods,
and that we never find peasant pieces before the
end of the reign of Louis XIV, for the very
excellent reason that in the seventeenth century
a family of country labourers had no furniture at
all, except for a rude bedstead, which has never
been preserved, and one or two coffers devoid
of ornamentation, which have also long since
disappeared. Of the middle-class furniture of the
Louis XIII period, or rather the Louis XIII
style — for this style in reality persisted in
middle-class furniture for a full century, and in
certain provinces, Burgundy, and specially
Guyenne and Gascony, even longer — there
survive cupboards still in goodly numbers, side-
boards, tables, arm-chairs, chairs, and stools.

But if we proceed from the seventeenth to
the sixteenth century, it becomes all but
impossible to find cupboards, cabinets, coffers,
seats, or tables belonging to the period, unless
costly and luxurious pieces ; many are fakes or
outrageously restored; and most of them are

INTRODUCTION xi

immobilized in museums or in great private
collections.

As for the furniture of the Middle Ages,
undamaged pieces dating from the fifteenth
century are infinitely rare, and those of the pre-
ceding centuries are, so to speak,non-existent. We
know more about the objects that found a place
in the home of an Egyptian under Rameses II
than about the furniture of a subject of Saint
Louis. Viollet-le-Duc has made a pretence of
describing the latter for us ; but in these affairs
that genial archaeologist was better equipped
with imagination than erudition. If we omit
the stalls in churches, the whole of France does
not perhaps contain more than half a dozen
pieces of furniture of the thirteenth century —
coffers and sacristy cupboards.

It is not hard to guess why sixteenth-century
pieces are scarce and those of the Middle Ages
almost beyond finding. Wooden objects, if
they are made of the best material and perfectly
wrought, will withstand a good two or three
hundred years of wear and tear, or neglect in a
loft, damp, drought, gnawing insects ; but it is
vastly more unlikely that at the end of four or
five centuries they should have held out against
the agents of slow destruction and escaped the
chances of brutal destruction, fire, war, or changes
in taste and increasing demands for comfort.
But that is not all. The population of our country
was far smaller then than now, and the proportion
of those who could own furniture was much lower ;

xii INTRODUCTION

and even they had very little furniture, especially
in the Middle Ages, and that little was of a very
special kind, in accordance w^ith the manners and
habits, so different from ours, that prevailed
among our ancestors down to the days of the
last Valois kings.

Instability and insecurity — those were two
dominant characteristics of the lives of the French
people in the Middle Ages. The only comparative
quiet was behind thick walls ; and again, one had
to be always ready for instant flight. The most
powerful lords, masters of several castles, had
only one single set of furniture, which went with
them at every move — no one would venture to
leave anything of value behind, no, not though
it was in a fortress held by a strong garrison. As
for the king himself, he had, in the fourteenth
century, a summer plenishing and a winter
plenishing ; and the one not in use was kept in
Paris by his officer of the wardrobe, who had at
his disposal four trunks and four chests to keep
therein the courtepointerie * and chamber
hangings, and to take them out of Paris at the
terms of Easter and All Saints, wherever the
sovereign might be.

And so everything that a man owns is trans-
portable, and every piece of furniture, if not a
coffer, has to take to pieces or be small enough
to go into a coffer. The only things that stay
permanently at home are large, rude, un-
ornamented pieces of furniture, such as bedsteads
made of common planks barely roughly planed,

INTRODUCTION xiii

tables that are simply boards set on trestles when
they are wanted, and plain wooden benches ; in
short, things that offer no temptation to pillagers
or whose loss will be of no moment. On the
return of the travellers, there will be brought out
from the chests and bouges or leather trunks,
which have followed on carts, or most frequently,
because there are no roads, on the backs of
sommiers^ pack mules and pack horses, the parti-
coloured stuffs and the cushions that are to
bedeck those rude oaken frames and make them
a little more inviting. The structure and the
decoration of most of the furniture wall largely,
as we shall see, depend on these exigencies, and ';
that down to the seventeenth century.

These nomadic ways did in reality, in a certain
measure, continue much longer than might be
imagined. We read in the inventory of Catherine
de Medici's furniture, with reference to the
sumptuous town house that Jean ^ Bullant had
built for her in the Rue des Deux-Ecus and the
Rue du Four, that " when she desired to eat
there or stay in it, which was very often, she had
the necessary furniture brought in, and her
officers carried it back after her departure."
Louis XIV was the first of our kings to have each \ j
of his royal mansions completely furnished ; N.
which nevertheless did not prevent his annual
comings and goings between Versailles and
Fontainebleau from being immense '' flittings."
In 1649, during the troubles of the Fronde, the
court must needs leave Paris precipitately to take

xiv INTRODUCTION

refuge at Saint Germain. An often quoted
passage from Mme. de Motteville's Memoirs
describes the state of destitution in which the
royal family found itself on the first day in that
magnificent but empty mansion. "The Queen
slept in a little bed that the Cardinal had got
out a few days before for that purpose. He had
also made provision for the King's needs. . . .
The Duchess of Orleans lay one night on straw
and Mademoiselle also. All who had followed
the Court had the same fate, and in a few hours
straw became so dear at Saint Germain that it
was not to be found for money."

Since it is practically impossible to find
authentic and complete furniture belonging to
the Middle Ages, and almost the same may be said
of the sixteenth century, and since, on the other
hand, the scope of this work only covers current,
simple furniture of everyday use, we ought strictly
to omit everything earlier than the seventeenth
century. Nevertheless, it seems necessary to
describe very briefly the evolution of French
furniture from the thirteenth to the sixteenth
century, and to give a little more extended space
to the history and description of the much better
known furniture of what is called the Renais-
sance ^ period. It will not be surprising, therefore,
to find that nearly half this volume and nearly

I It is doubtless unnecessary to set forth once more the reasons
why this word — whether we are dealing with statues or churches,
tapestries or sideboards — is as inaccurate as possible, like the
word " gothic," but it is so consecrated by three centuries of use
that we must needs use it, however vexing it may be.

INTRODUCTION xv

two thirds of the illustrations are devoted to the
Louis XIII style alone : furniture of this kind —
we do not say " of this epoch " — is fairly plenti-
ful, especially in Burgundy, in the old county of
Montbeliard, in the valleys of the Garonne and
the Dordogne ; it is not yet falling to pieces, far
from it ; and as at this moment it is far less in
favour, with the public that is satisfied with
blindly running after the fashion, than the
furniture of the eighteenth century, it is possible
to acquire perfectly genuine specimens at
reasonable prices.^

I We here tender our thanks to the owners of old pieces and
to the keepers of museums, to whose kindness we owe the
illustrations in this volume, to the Mother Superior of the Hospice
of Beaune, Mesdames Boujut, Dumesnil, Dumoulin, Egan ; Mile,
de Felice; Mme. Roudier; Messieurs de Brugiere de Belrieu,
de Charmasse, Clamageran, Desportes, Durbesson, Fichot,
Hubert, Say, Lamiray, Laregnere, Loreilhe, Pascaud, Pauvert,
Rigault : the Keepers of the Musee de I'Union centrale des Arts
d^coratifs, the Musee Lorrain de Nancy, the Musee d'Epinal,
and the Musee departemental d* Antiquites de Rouen.

PRINCIPAL AUTHORITIES

Arnaud d'Agnel (L'Abbe Georges) : " Le Meuble proven^al
et comtadin." (Vol. I.) Paris, 1913.

Bayard, 6mile : " Le Style Renaissance." Paris (n.d.)
" Le Style Louis XIII." Paris (n.d.)

BONNAFFE, Edmond : " Le Meuble en France au XVP siecle."
Paris, 1887.

Catalogues des Collections Bonnaffe, Paris, 1897: l^mile
Gaillard, Paris, 1904.— Gavet, Paris, 1897.— Leclanch^, Paris,
1892 —Martin le Roy, Paris, 1907.— Moreau-Nelaton, Paris,
1900.— Rougier, Paris, 1904.— Seilliere, Paris, 1890.—
Soltykoff, Paris, 1861.— Spitzer, Paris, 1891.— Stein, Paris,
1886.— Waisse, Paris, 1 885.

Champeaux, Alfred de: "Le Meuble" (Bibliotheque de
I'Enseignement des Beaux- Arts). (Vol. I.) Paris (n.d.)

Deshairs, Leon : " La Tapisserie et le Mobilier au XVI<= siecle,"
in the Hisloire dc I'Art, published under the editorship of
Andr6 Michel. (Vol. V, part H.) Paris (n.d.)

Funck-Brentano : " L' Ameublement frangais sous la Renais-
sance." (Bibliotheque de I'Art d^coratif.) Paris, 1913.

Havard, Henri: " Dictionnaire de rAmeublement et de la
Decoration." Paris (n.d.)

Molinier, 6mile : " Histoire g^nerale des Arts appliques."

(Vols. II and III.) Paris, 1896.
Vie a la Cainpague. Special numbers on I'Art rustique au Pays

de France. (December, 1913, 1919, 1920, and 1921.)

ViOLLET LE Due : * Dictionnaire raisonn^ des Mobilier franfais."
(Vol. I.) Paris, 1858.

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

INTRODUCTION v

PART I

FURNITURE OF THE MIDDLE AGES I

PART II

FURNITURE OF THE RENAISSANCE 29
I. HISTORY AND CHARACTERISTICS OF THE

STYLE 31

II. DIFFERENT ARTICLES OF FURNITURE 65

PART III

THE LOUIS XIII STYLE 87
L HISTORY AND CHARACTERISTICS OF THE

STYLE 89

II. DIFFERENT PIECES OF FURNITURE 118

INDEX 149

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Frontispiece, Cupboard in two parts (middle of Sixteenth
Century)

FIG. PLATE

1 . Cofer with Fenestrations or " Orhe-voies*' in Oak, Fifteenth

Century I

2. Coffer with Fenestrations and Pillars, in Oak. Fifteenth

Century 2

3. Buffet with Cant CornerSf Iron Fittings " a Orbe-voies" in

Oak. End of Fifteenth Century

4. Chair with Carved " Serviette" or " Parchemins Replies"

Decorations (Linenfold) 4

5. Chair ivith Coffer Scat, "h Claircs-Voies" and " Orbe-

voicSf" in Oak. Fifteenth Century 5

6. Very large Chair with Coffer Seat, with " Orbc-voies" and

*' Parchemins Simples," in Oak. Fifteenth Century 6

7. Small Bench with Opened End Pieces 7

8. Coffer from Lorraine with EntrelacSf Oak. Sixteenth Century 8
9 Cofer with small Panels, Walnut inlaid with Yellow Wood.

Middle of the Sixteenth Century 9

10. Coffer with Medallion Decoration. Middle of the Sixteenth

Century 10

11. Norman Coffer with Caryatids, Oak. End oj the Style II

12. *' Archebanc-couchette," in Oak. Middle of the Sixteenth

Century 12

13. Cupboard in two parts, from Burgundy, Walnut. End of

the Style 13

14. Small Cupboard, of Walnut inlaid with Marble, in the style

of the Ile-de-F ranee. Period of Henri 111. I4

15. Cupboard with long Pillars, Walnut. Period of Henri HI. 15

16. Buffet carved with Grotesques, Oak. Period of Francois I. 16

17. Large Buffet with Pilasters, Walnut 17

18. Expanding Table, Wahiut 18

19. Small Table with fixed Trestle Legs carved with Griffins, in

Walnut 19

20. Table with six Legs, Walnut inlaid with Fillets of light

coloured Wood. End of the Style 20

21. Chair with Coffer Seat, in Walnut. Second half of the

Sixteenth Century 21

22 and 21. " Caquetoires" or Small Chairs with Arms, with

Medallion Decorations 22

24. "Caquetoire" with Balusters ") ^a

25. " Caquetoire " with very high Seat} ^

xxii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FIG. PLATE

26. " Vertugadin " Chair, in chased Velvet. End of the Style ")

27. " Caquetoire " with Scroll Arms. End of the Style ) ^

28. " Caquetoire Garnie " with Consoles ") _

29. '* Caquetoire Garnie" with Plume Decoration) ^

30. Chair with Arms, in the Spanish-Flemish Style, Gilded

Leather. Reign of Henri IV. 26

31. Small Norman Coffer on its Stand, in Oak, Louis XIII Style 27

32. Cupboard with four Doors and Small Panels, on its Stand.

Normandy, beginning of the Seventeenth Century 28

33. Large Cupboard with four Doors and Small Panels, in

Walnut. Beginning of the Style 29

34. Small Cupboard with two Doors, Oak and Walnut. Dated

1659 (Modern Metalwork) 30

35. Cupboard in two Parts from the County of Montbeliard,

in Oak 31

36. Large Cupboard in two Parts, Walnut,without its Pediment.

Beginning of the Style. 32

37. Small Cupboard in two Parts, with two Drawers, in

Walnut 33

38. Small Cupboard in two Parts with Eagle Feet, in Walnut 34

39. Cabinet or Buffet with Balusters and Plumes, in Walnut 35

40. Cabinet in two Parts with Cornice and "Pointes de

Gateau" Decoration, in Walnut 36

41. Gascon Cupboard in two Parts, elaborately carved. Walnut 37

42. Gascon Cupboard in two Parts with Interrupted Pediment 38

43. Gascon Cupboard in two Parts in Walnut (Modern Pedi-

ment) 39

44. Very large Gascon Cupboard with Cornice and Disengaged

Pillars, in Walnut 40

45. Gascon Cupboard with Diamond Point Decoration, Walnut 4I

46. Cupboard with one Door with Flat Diamond Points and

Circular Motives, in Cherrywood 42

47. Small Cupboard in one Piece, from Burgundy, with Dia-

mond Points, in Oak 43

48. Gascon Cupboard ivith Large Cornice, in Walnut, partly

painted black 44

49. Large Burgundian Cupboard with Diamond Points, in

Walnut 45

50. Very large Gascon Cupboard with Diamond Points and

Twist Engaged Pillars 46

51. Large Gascon Cupboard with Detached Pillars 47

52. Gascon " Buffet a Vaisselicr " (Dresser Buffet), Walnut 48

53. Table with two Flaps and Twist Legs, in Walnut "^

54. Table with Moulding on Drawer and Twist Legs, in > 49

Walnut )

55. Burgundian Table, in Walnut 50

56. Small Table with Ornate Drawer, in Walnut ")

57. Basset or Small Folding Table-Escabeau, in Walnut y ^

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xxiii

FIG. PLATE

58. Cherry-wood Table with Turned Balusters *)

59. Turned Table from Provence with X-shafed Stretcher, in\ 52

Walnut )

60. Folding Table with Folding Under-Frame, coloured Wood

Marquetry 53

6r. Large Table with Folding Under-Frame, in Oak 54

62. Folding Gaming Table, in Walnut 55

63. Arm-chair with Bead Turnings, in Leather, originally^

Gilded [ 56

64. Armchair with Bead Turnings, Modern Cover j
6$' Arm-chair with Carved Busts ")

66. Child's Arm-chair with Baluster Turnings] ^'

67. " Vertugadin" Chair covered in Chased Velvets 58

68. Arm-chair with Baluster Turnings y

69. " Vertugadin " Chair with Bead Turnings, upholstered ^

in Leather

70. " Vertugadin " Chair with Twist Legs, stretched with

Leather )

71. Lono Chair with High Back, in Modern Needlework^

Tapestry f ^

72. Chair with Baluster Turnings, in Modern Needlework i

Tapestry )

73. Basset Stool with Baluster Turnings ") ,

74. " Vertugadin " Chair with Movable Cushions}

75. Sofa, Louis XIV Period, Modern Needlework Tapestry 62

76. Rest-bed with Modern Upholstery 63
}y and 78. Footstools, Point Tapestry 64

59

PART ONE

FURNITURE OF THE
MIDDLE AGES

PART ONE : FURNITURE OF
THE MIDDLE AGES

Let us first of all confess that we are exceedingly-
ill informed with regard to the furniture of the
Middle Ages. Of what our ancestors used
before the thirteenth century we know, in a
manner of speaking, nothing at all. For the
century of Saint Louis and the two next
centuries our sources of information are the
miniatures in manuscripts, paintings, which were
very rare before the fifteenth century, though
sufficiently numerous thereafter, but mostly-
Flemish, and carvings in stone, wood or ivory ;
ancient documents, and particularly contemporary
accounts and inventories ; and lastly, the actual
pieces that have survived.

From these diverse sources we may draw only
with very great caution. The admirable truth-
fulness of the Van Eycks and the paintings of
their school may inspire us with complete con-
fidence ; but the illuminators of the preceding
centuries misrepresented a great deal, simplified
a great deal, and they were inspired by tradition
quite as much as by direct observation, and we
can say the same thing of the imagiers.

The inventories, so captivating to read and so
rich in information of every kind for anyone who
can interpret them, give rise to strange blunders.
Thus, an improvised archaeologist of the last

4 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

century, reading that a certain bench was h
coulomb es^ quite genuinely thought that pigeons
were carved on it, simply because he lacked the
knowledge that in the Middle Ages a coulombe
or colombe was any column, stake or upright
whatsoever, and in the particular, a bench leg ;
while another, in commenting upon a text in
which it was stated that the queen, in 1316, was
followed in her removals by twelve coifers, two
for the bed, two for the mattresses, six for the
wardrobe, and two '^ pour les damoyselleSy^
thought it meant the trunks for the ladies in
waiting, not chests to contain those '' demoiselles
ci atourner^^ which were the dressing tables of
the ladies of those days, a kind of round table
with central pillar, surmounted with a feminine
head of carved and painted wood, on which the
coiffures were placed.

Furthermore, the lack of precision in their
vocabulary is often most embarrassing. What,
for example, were les selles ? A great number
of documents inform us : very simple stools with
three legs or four. According to certain others,
it is clear that they were also little benches " for
the feet," and low trestles, on which laundresses
set their washing tubs. But here is another text,
which speaks of a selle '* eight feet long, covered
with cloth of gold," another of a selle on which,
at the crowning of the queen, six princesses of
the blood were seated. And so on.

Face to face with the pieces still existing in
churches, museums, and private collections, the

CARPENTERS 5

critical sense must be no less alert. Many are
incomplete, many are — too complete, many have
been denatured by old or recent restoration,
over-decorated with more or less avowable aim ;
they are now denuded of their paint — how
can we know how far they were painted of old?
Lastly, and above all, if suspicious specimens are
once eliminated, the remainder are so few that it
is almost impossible to steer clear of the rock of
an arbitrary generalisation.

In any case, here is the essence and the one
thing certain — or practically certain. Down to
nearly the middle of the fourteenth century
there were only carpenters available to work in
wood; it is the very utmost if there is a dis-
tinction made among them of '' charpentiers de
la petite cognee^^'' who execute work slightly less
coarse than the squaring and assembling of
beams, joists, puncheons, and roof ties. Joining
of wood cut thin was almost unknown to them,
and the coffers of the thirteenth century^ are
constructed with thick boards, very rudely cut
out, that only hold together thanks to the fine
braces of wrought iron that (fover their whole
surface with scrolls. Their wood was without a
doubt painted red, or perhaps covered with hide
or painted canvas, on which the ironwork stood
out. In the same way also were made the
sacristry cupboards of the same epoch.^

1 There is one in the Carnavalet Museum, another in the
Musee de I'Union centrale des Arts decoratifs.

2 See the Cathedrals of Noyon and Bayeux, and the church of
Obazine (Correze).

i

6 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

In the fourteenth century woodworkers are
in possession of nearly all the tools of the present
day, and distinct progress is achieved. We begin
to see coffers that, while still continuing to be
made simply of planks, are assembled in such a
way that they can dispense with iron. If each
of their sides is made of two pieces of planking,
they are no longer merely glued together with a
plain joint, but dovetailed into each other with
tongue and groove, and the corners are made
with that jointing with triangular pieces, known
as ^'' en queue d^aronde " or swallow-tail, which
everybody is familiar with, since it is always
employed to join the front of a drawer to the
sides. So now the sides of the coffer are set
free for the carved decoration, a decoration en
tatlle d^epargne^ or cut out of the thickness
of the plank : the coffre de tatlle is born
with its brothers the banc de tatlle and the
buffet de tatlle}

But soon after there comes a change of great
importance in another manner. The coffer con-
structed in the way just described had still very
great faults. To be strong its walls had to be
very thick, and so, even though it was rid of its
iron carapace, it remained exceedingly heavy.
If, for fear of its rotting, it was desired to raise it
from the ground, people were reduced to the
necessity of cutting out the bottom plank in
front and back into the shape of feet, and this
was far from strong. These thick planks,
I Carved.

THE PANEL 7

alternately subjected to cold and to heat, to
moisture and dryness, inevitably split. Some
workman, or more probably workmen, in their
own sphere men of genius no less than the
master masons who created vaulting and the
flying buttress, invented panelled furniture and
woodwork. For full walls of uniform thickness
they substituted a system of frames, made up of
uprights and horizontal pieces of thick wood,
joined with mortice and tenon; xht feutl hires,
the inner edges of the frame, were given deep
grooves, in which were fitted, so as to have clear
play, a panel which could be quite thin, since it
was nothing more than a containing shell, in no
way contributing to the solid strength of the
whole structure. In its slightly loose setting it
could expand in wet weather and contract in
dry without danger of splitting. A coffer built
in this fashion, while it was lighter, was stronger
and more solid, qualities of inestimable value for
articles that were constantly being transported
to and fro.

In fine, the new system of construction was
in every way comparable with that which nearly
two centuries earlier had transformed architecture.
This stout enframement of thin walls, is it not
like the buttresses of the wall of a gothic church,
between which open the vast windows full of
glass ? Or, if it is preferred, like the ribs of a
gothic vaulting, the strong elastic armature that
allows the panels of the vaulting to be as thin
as the builder pleases ? The art of joinery was

8 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

born : this was indeed the moment when the
guild of the huchiers-me?iuisiersst^2ii2itt6.hoTii
that of the charpentiers}

Handin hand with this technical progress went
artistic progress also, for to the logic and im-
peccable good sense of the artists and craftsmen
of the Middle Ages the decoration of any piece of
work whatever must spring strictly from its
material and the way it was constructed, and
must show up that construction and draw strength
from it instead of concealing it. Henceforth the
front of a coffer, to keep to this primordial piece
of furniture, will be full of life, endowed with a
certain rhythm by the alternation of its panels,
which will now be carved because they are more
sheltered, and its uprights, which will be left
plain because they are exposed to knocks, to the
rubbing of the pack ropes and other dangers.
They wiH act as the " rest " parts in the decora-
tion of the piece. This method of construction
brings about a diversity of planes which is
decorative in itself and which necessarily entails
the use of mouldings.^ In short, the impression
of beauty must spring at the first glance from the
actual construction : elegance and purity of
shape are to be the essential thing, and the
decoration proper, the local decoration, will only
come second. In all this the craftsmen in wood
are only following, whether consciously or no,

1 Coffers continued, to save labour, to be made of planks
joined a queue d'aronde; but this method was looked on as
rude and coarse.

2 Fig. I.

ARCHITECTURE DOMINANT 9

the path traced out by the admirable workers in
stone when they elaborated the gothic style ;
whether it be hutcher or image carver or mason,
the principles are the same.

When life became something more secure and
more sedentary, when all furniture was no longer
made so as to be easily transported hither and
thither, the solid frame became covered with
carving in its turn, as in the little bench of Fig. 7,
with its scaly legs ; or it became enriched with
applied ornament, such as the spindled balusters
and half balusters of the much restored coffer
reproduced in Fig. 2, which is taken as originally
coming from Domremy.

One of the most salient characteristics __of
me diaeval art is its unity. No style is more
homogeneous tha n the gothic, because at this
period religious architecture domir|fltpa lay
architecture, and architecture reigns over^alLthe
other arts. Not only do we find, over and over
again7tHe~same decorative motives, but the very
same forms — provided the material is not re-
fractory — in jewellery, ivory carving, locksmithery,
brasswork, woodwork, as are seen in the work
of the masons. The gilded wooden frame of a
painted triptych is a miniature facade of a church
with triple nave ; a reliquary is a miniature
chapel; the ornamental openwork frieze of an
ivory comb or the pierced iron brace of a buffet
is a reduced copy of some flamboyant balustrade
of a triforium or a roof gutter. In the same way
all the elements of a coffer of the time of

lo LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

Charles V, a buffet or chair e * made under
Louis XI, are borrowed from contemporary-
architecture.

The Cluny Museum has a very fine fourteenth
century oak coffer, the fagade of which is all
carved work, and is made up of six arcades, which
are completely and exactly in all details windows
en tiers-point of that rather dry style which
tradition insists on calling gothique rayonnant.
Each is subdivided by a vertical mullion into
two secondary arcades with the arch a redents,
the whole forming twelve frames, in which are
statuettes of the twelve peers of France armed
and holding their shields. The ecoingons
separating the points of the large arches are
carved with bestions ^ and grotesque faces. It is
impossible not to be struck with the similarity
of this decoration to that of the king's gallery
in a cathedral.

In a buffet of the fifteenth century there is
not a single detail that is not to be seen in the
Church of the Trinity at Vendome, or in the
apse of Saint Severin in Paris. The uprights
are flanked by slender counterforts with flat
sides, with ribs, pillars either prismatic or ribbed,
the feet of which sink down and penetrate ^ into
the talus of the base ; the finials are sharp-

1 Small fantastic animals such as winged dragons, basilisks,
etc.

2 The penetration of mouldings into one another, of the
springing of the arches into the piers, the bases of little columns
into the bases of pillars, etc., is one of the characteristics of the
" flamboyant " style.

CARVED PANELS ii

pointed tiny steeples ; the cuh-de-lampe are
made of sharp-angled mouldings ; the top of the
framing of the panels is a " basket-handle " {anse
de panier) or " bracket "-shaped ^ moulding,
which sometimes penetrates into the vertical
mouldings of the uprights. All this follows the
complicated laws of the '' flamboyant " style,
which the whole of France was borrowing from
her English enemies at the very moment when
she was driving them from her shores.

But w hat is characteristic above all is the
carved decoratjon_ _of the panels. Those w hich
fall the most conspicuous places on furniture,
such as the guichets or doors of buffets, the
ta^ades ot cotters, the backs of tall chairs, are
a lmost invariably tailles d orbe-voies ,^ TiT
architecture there was opposed to the clairevote^
or pierced arcading, the orbe-voie ^ or fenetre-
morte, an arcading or a simple blind arcade, in
which the mullions were replaced by mouldings
jutting out from the plain wall, which repro-
duced the mulHons exactly in detail. The
joiner-carpenters did not fail to adopt this form
of decoration, complicating it at their own
caprice and modifying it in a hundred different
ways ^ ; but always in even the freest interpre-
tation we can perceive the elements of a
flamboyant window : in the lower part, the

1 Fig. 6.

2 Also said to be onvrcs h osteatix.

3 Orbe means blind.

4 Figs. I, 2, 3, 8, 5 and 6 show panels a orbevoie; Fig. 7
displays panels k claire-voic.

12 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

subdivision into narrow compartments by vertical
mullions ; above, the flowing network tracery
whose curves form soufflets (quatrefoils elongated
upwards, with pointed lobes) and moucheties
(elongated and wavy-outlined ellipses, with
internal tracery). Frequently, near the apex, a
gable* bracket-shaped with floriated point,
stands out against a new series of vertical
mullions ^ : once more, this is an imitation of
the fronts of churches.

The combination of soufflets and mouchettes
is supple enough to lend itself to quite com-
plicated designs, such as the large fleurs-de-lis
seen on the canted corners of the buffet
reproduced in Fig. 3. As a general rule,
soufllets are decorated with four-petalled flowers,*
and often there is a heraldic shield set in the
network of the ribs.^

Polychromy accentuated the delicate richness
of this decoration, the traceries of the fenestra-
tion probably being picked out in gilding against
a background of bright colours, which still
further increased the resemblance to a stained
glass window. Polychromy, and polychromy in
very vivid colours, was, it must be borne well in
mind, one of the fixed principles of the whole art
of the Middle Ages : a coffer was variegated with
azure, vermilion and gold, just like the saints of
the church porticos and the little ivory Virgins.
It was from their painters in ordinary that our

1 Figs. 2, 3 and 6.

2 Figs. I and 5.

3 Figs. 2 and 3.

LINENFOLD DECORATION 13

kings ordered their chairs of state. In 1352,
Girard d'Orleans, who may perhaps be the author
of the portrait of John the Good preserved in
the BibHotheque Nationale, furnished that un-
lucky monarch with " deux chaieres oiivrees a
orbe-voies a deux endroiz etpaintes^^^ and for his
sons, '' chaieres ouvrees a orbe-votes a deux
endroiz et paint es ii leurs armesJ^ In 1399,
Perrin Balloches, the painter, delivers "pour
Monseigneur Messire Loys de France, deux
chaieres, d est assavoir Vune de salle, V autre
de retrait^^ celle de salle painte de fines
couleurs?"* Nearly a hundred years after, we
have Master Jean Bourdichon, painter to the
king, a person of importance (which did not
prevent him from painting banners, daises and
lances as well as illuminating the queen's book of
hours), who furnished Anne of Brittany with
" deux chair es tournissees^ par luy tainctes et
toutes dories y

Another motive, everywhere recurring, now
on simple pieces,^ now associated with orbe-voies
when it is a more costly piece,'* but in that case
relegated to secondary places, is xh.Q parchemin
replii or serviette} In its most elementary form
this is a relief with bracket profile^; but the

1 The >«//f was a great room of state; the retrait,?i smaller
and more intimate chamber, which was used for ordinary-
occasions.

2 A kind of armchair turning on a pivot

3 Fig. 4.

4 Figs. 5, 6 and 7.

5 We read also, for instance : " tin banc ouvrd h panncaux de
draperye."

6 Figs. 5 and 6.

14 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

parchment or stuff which this ornamentation is
supposed to represent may be folded several times
on itself, and in many different ways.^ This
motive is aWays a little dry and poor ; and we
must confess that in the fifteenth century and
the early sixteenth the joiners really did abuse it.

Lastly, vegetable motives are displayed upon
the panels, or wind their way along in the hollow
moulding of the cornices. The most usual are
the vine leaf ^ and the bunch of grapes, more or
less conventionalised, and when the carving is
very deeply cut, the thistle and the chou frise^
mingled or not mingled with real or fantastic
beasts. These are, as is well known, the favourite
vegetable motives of stone carvers in the period
of the flamboyant style. As for the human
figure, it is also met with, but only on exceptional
pieces of furniture.

The choicest furniture was made of " Irish
wood " or oak from the North, the rest was of
common oak ; but walnut, which is such a
beautiful material, not so rough as oak, finer and
closer in grain, soft to the tool and capable of
the finest polish, was sometimes used, alone or in
conjunction with oak, from the fourteenth
century onwards. In the decree of approval,
issued in 1371 by Messire Hugues Aubricot,
Provost of Paris, for *' huchiers, presentemefit
appeles menuisiers^'^ and confirmed by Parlia-
ment in 1382, which is as it were the foundation

1 Figs. 4 and 7.

2 Fig. 3.

EBONY 15

charter of the new corporation, there is ah-eady
a question of " aumoires a pans de hois de
noyer,^^ A buffet in the Cluny Museum, which
is still completely gothic in style, although it
has no external braces, is made of oak, but the
door panels are of carved walnut.''

Already one foreign and exotic wood was
known, ebony, then called ybenus, of which
were made boxes, knife handles, and other little
objects ; there were, in France in the fourteenth
century, small pieces of furniture inlaid with
ebony and ivory. In 13 17, Queen Jeanne in the
Louvre was in possession of '^two tables for
eating, of wood ornamented with small pieces of
ivory and ebony, of which one is in two pieces
and a half and folding, and the other in two
pieces, upon which table the Queen has her
meals." Were these inlaid tables — ^hinged panels
that were unfolded on trestles for meals — imported
from the East, like so many other articles " of
Damascus work," or did they come from Italy,
and were they decorated with that certosma,
that travail de Chartreux lately invented, they
say, at Siena ? However it might be, it was not
French work.

The foregoing is a condensed description of
the technique and style of the furniture of the
Middle Ages. In fine, in spite of polychromy,
and despite the fact that up to the sixteenth
century many pieces, the majority without a
doubt, were made of plain heavy wood intended
I It must date from the early years of the'sixteenth century

i6 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

to be continually covered with painted and
embroidered stuffs, they were mostly works of
mouldings and carving, and never was wood-
carving finer ; always attacked with admirable
boldness, while sometimes it was caressing and
full of subtlety, it is above all broad and vigorous,
a manner especially proper for work in oak.
Have craftsmen of any trade ever been known to
possess more complete mastery of it than those
who built and carved the miraculous stalls of
Amiens Cathedral ?

It remains now for us to make a rapid survey
of the various kinds of furniture used by the
people of the Middle Ages. The list is by no
means a long one.
^ The coffre or huche is the pre-eminent piece,

f| the ancestor and prototype of the rest. No
other takes its place, and it is capable, should
need be, of supplanting all the others. The
proof of its importance is the name of huchiers
adopted by all furniture makers. There was a
time, and in every period before the seventeenth
century there were circles in which it was the
only piece in existence besides the bench, and
even on occasions took the place of the latter.
In sacristies it held the priestly vestments, in
the charter-room the archives, in lihrairies'^
the manuscripts not actually chained to the
reading desks ; in the hall, the chamber and the
withdrawing room of nobles or rich burgesses,

I The library or study (estiide), the modern biblioiheque or
cabinet de travail.

THE COFFER 17

a long coffer called a garde-robe held clothes
without the necessity of folding them ; a lover
might hide in one at a pinch ; another contained
linen, another the hangings, the loose covers for
furniture, the store of stuffs in the piece ; yet
another — the coffre a denier s f err e — held plate,
coined money, valuable papers, and this last
coffer v^as put in the chapel if there was one, so
that any theft might be aggravated by the guilt
of sacrilege ; against the bed there stood a long,
narrow, low coffer that served as a step to scale
the heights of the couch. A piece of stuff, a
flat cushion is laid on a coffer — behold a seat !
It is too high, of course, but there are little
bench stools expressly made to rest the feet on.*
With a mattress it can be turned into a bed.
To the clerk it is a writing table, for the
merchant a counter. In the kitchen it takes the
name maie and bread is kneaded in it, and
when baked kept in it. In a flitting it is loaded
on to a cheval hahutier or put into a cart.
Coffers specially meant for travelling were the
leather bouges and malles^ coffres a fest^ which
have a double sloped roof like a shrine, and
especially the cofres a bahiit^ or bahitts, or
again bahuts sommiers.

What precisely is a bahut ? Since the middle
of the last century an absurd habit has prevailed
of giving this name to every form of panelled

I This explains the existence of those Louis XIII style stools,
too low to sit on comfortably, too high for foot rests if one is
sitting on an ordinary chair.

B

i8 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

furniture, whether ancient or faked up in the
ancient fashion, cupboards, under-cupboards,
buffets, cabinets, coffers. And the habit is so
deeply rooted that this twisted word is flaunted
through one of the latest (and best) catalogues
of the Louvre.^ Originally the bahut was a
supplementary case or box, of no great depth,
with domed lid, fitting on to an ordinary coffer,
and so fitted when people set out on a journey.
In it were put clothes and articles wanted while
travelling, so that they could readily be got
at without undoing the pack load or opening the
coffer. The cofre a bahut v^di^ first of all a coffer
equipped with this accessory, then a travelling
coffer with domed top, lastly, any coffer what-
ever was called a bahut^ but never any other
piece of furniture.^

The coffre ouvre was carved ; the coffre
tout plein was not ; the coffre vermeil was
sheathed in red leather, others were covered
with canvas glued down and painted over.

By way of iron fittings, coffers may have, on
the lid, two wrought and pierced braces, called
bastons de fer ; or a single one in the middle,
to the end of which is jointed the moraillon or
hasp, whose auberon penetrates into the lock to
be caught by the bolt. The hasp and the

1 The catalogue of the Arconati-Visconti Collection, in which
the celebrated cupboard attributed to Hugues Sambin is de-
scribed as a hahut

2 The arche or ark seems also to have been, at the outset, a
box with domed lid; afterwards it was confounded with the
coffer.

CUPBOARDS 19

palastre or case of the lock are sometimes
veritable masterpieces of delicate forging and
chasing: strange animals, fenestrations and other
architectural motives, foliage, repousse and cut
out in the iron beaten out thin under the
hammer (for sheet iron v^as not yet in existence),
and riveted on to the lock case, human figures
and even complicated scenes are all carried out
with marvellous v^orkmanship, if one considers
the rudimentary tools with which the locksmith
had to content himself.

The coffer was far from convenient, since in
order to open it you were obliged to remove
whatever had been placed on its lid, which
served as a table, and to get at anything in the
bottom all the rest of its contents must needs be
taken out. Little by little, therefore, it was
driven out from noble and wealthy homes by
pieces with doors and drawers ; but this only
came about very slowly, and the coffer did not
wholly disappear until the beginning of the
eighteenth century.

Nearly all the cupboards dating from the
Middle Ages have disappeared. Those for lay
use were most frequently part of the cham-
brillage^ or wainscoting, of a chamber, and thus
were not, strictly speaking, articles of furniture.
In Paris there is still to be seen a large cupboard
of this kind, still in the very place where it was
made. Very interesting and curious, though
greatly restored, it is fixed in the wall of the
" treasure chamber " of the church of St.

20 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

Germain I'Auxerrois.^ Above a projecting base-
ment ornamented with serviettes repliees, which
serves as a bench, there are six doors wider than
their height, in two rows, with long worked iron
braces. The whole is crowned with a pierced
cresting. This cupboard dates from the second
half of the fifteenth century.

The buffet is a very ancient piece of furniture,
but it began by being a coffer. Does not
Benoit de Sainte-More, the twelfth century
poet, in his Roman de Thebes make Polynices
the son of Oedipus sit on a buffet ? In the
sixteenth century it was usually a small cupboard
in two parts, whose lower part was doorless ; it
was called a buffet a armoire? But there are
also buffets without the cupboard ; made simply
of superimposed shelves, they are much like
dressers {dressoirs) ; and also buffets whose lower
part has guichets^ while the upper part has none ;
others again, open below, have a cupboard in the
middle, and on top a back equipped with one or
more shelves or gradins^ used to display beautiful
and costly objects, cups of crystal glass,
aquamaniles (little basins for washing the
hands after meals), noix d'Inde (cocoanuts),
ivory boxes, goblets made of horn, bois madre^^
or goldsmith's work. This was a noble piece, and

1 With its wainscoted walls, its old beams, its pavement,
which is partly ancient, and in spite of a table which is a ridiculous
forgery, this little room, worked in over the porch, is one of the
most curious and interesting spots in Paris, and one of the most
evocative of the past, as the phrase goes.

2 Fig. 3.

3 " Knot " or figured walnut or maple, much sought after.

THE BUFFET 21

the number of shelves was strictly regulated
according to etiquette ; a queen had the right
to five shelves, a princess to four, a countess to
three, the lady of a knight banneret to two, the
wife of a plain noble to one only; a middle
class female might not aspire to such a possession
at all.

The least uncommon type is built as follows :
The ground plan is rectangular, or very frequently
has canted corners. Above a base with short
feet, or resting directly on the ground (and
not even always present), is the open part, the
back of which is divided into panels, decorated
or plain ; the upper part is sometimes supported
in front by two pillars, sometimes it has dummy
doors ; it opens with one or two guichets or
cupboards, below which runs a carved frieze.
The oldest models sometimes have one or two
layettes-coulisses^ or drawers.^ The ironwork
on these buffets, sometimes exceedingly decorative
and worked like a jewel, was nailed on over a strip
of hide, of cloth or red velvet, which set off its
delicate traceries, and their vertevelles ^ were of
large dimensions and played an important part
in the decoration of the piece. The huchiers
of this great epoch had too much fine taste to
disguise this indispensable ironwork.

1 The layette was for a long time a box, a little wooden coffer
placed in a large coffer, for small valuable objects, papers, etc.
If it formed part of the coffer it was a chaitron. The layette-
coulisse or layette qui se tire was invented about 1470, and
drawers were known by that name until the end of the seventeenth
century.

2 The rings in which the bolts slid.

22 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

We have very little to say of the table ; in the
Middle Ages it v^as, so to say, a temporary and
intermittent piece of furniture. When the hour
came for a meal, the master of the house took
his seat ''au chef de la table, en sa chair e^^^ the
guests on the long heavy bench that had its
permanent place along a v^all or in front of the
fire-place ; the servants put trestles before them,
and "set up the table," in other v^ords, laid on
these trestles the table properly so called, which
might be merely plain deal and made of boards
set side by side, spread the cloth, then arranged
the trenchers, which took the place of plates, the
knives (there were no forks as yet), and the rolls
of bread, while others went round with ewers
and basins for hand washing ; lastly the dishes
were brought on. The meal finished and grace
said, the cloth was removed, the table taken
down, the trestles carried away, and the diners
rose. The tables were very narrow and one side
left free for serving ; if the diners were too many,
two tables were set up at right angles to one
another, or three arranged in horse-shoe fashion.

As may readily be conceived, the tables exist
no longer, nor the trestles, which were of wood
or iron or brass, and often folded.

Tables for any other purpose but eating were
hardly known, except the lectrin^ of which we
shall speak presently, and the demoiselle^ whose
use we have already described. Coffers and small
seats, such as escabeaux, tlacets^ selles and
M bassetSy took their place.

BEDS 23

The lectrin or lectern, and the pupitre (desk),
the first for reading and the second more
especially for writing, but both frequently
confounded with one another, were the two
articles essential for the estiide or study. Here
may be noted a combination of the two : upon
a pillar, carved like the screw of a press and
furnished with a very solid base (which might
take the form of a book- box), there was mounted
a small round table that could be raised or
lowered by turning it about ; on top of this was
a desk with double slope.

The basset was a very small square or round
table, " made like a stool," but taller.

Down to the end of the fifteenth century
beds were either coarse things of carpentry,
completely hidden by coverings of stuff, and
over which, hung by cords from the roof beams,
there was a tester whence curtains fell down,
the dossier against the wall, 2indiX.\iQ gouttieres^ ;
or else they were shut beds {lits clos), a kind of
huge box made of wooden panels, with five walls
(the sixth being replaced by curtains), inside
which one could find refuge from the draughts
that raged about the ill-enclosed dwellings of
the olden time. Other beds had only a wall
at the back and another along one side, with
a slender carven shaft holding up the corner of
the tester ; of this kind are the pair of beds

I The {lonttibre was originally a scalloped strip of stuff
round the pavilion of a tent, serving to throw off the rain. The
same name was then given, by analogy, to this ornament of a
bed tester, which was later to be called a pcnte.

24 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

belonging to the Musee de I'Union Centrale des
Arts decoratifs, and dating from the end of the
fifteenth century. Needless to say that these
pieces are extraordinarily rare. During the day
the curtains were drawn together at the corners
of the bed, lifted up on themselves and fastened
so as to make a kind of big purse.

There still remains the numerous company
of seats. There were three noble seats: the
faudesteuil^ the banc h dos (and still more
noble, the banc a ciel), and the chaire.

The faudesteuil (the English fold-stool), a re-
mote descendant of the Roman curule chair, is
not very well known ; it seems to have been the
most honorific of the family of seats. The king
sat in it, under his dais, in ceremonial circum-
stances, but he sat in it also to have his head
combed and to have his beard trimmed. It had,
therefore, a low back. It was generally an
X-shaped seat, with curving limbs, fitted with
straps of leather and stuffs for seat and back,
similar to the seats that are still fashionable in
Italy.

Let us imagine the back wall of a long coffer
prolonged upwards, and the two sides also, but
only by a foot, and we shall have an archebanc
or coffer-bench. The earliest church stalls were
made in this way. These pieces, meant for two
uses, were greatly liked by our forefathers, and
many old benches have a coffer for seat, with
or without a lock and key. We might also have
a backed bench that was not a coflfer, and the

BENCHES 25

sides need not then have full walls ; it was then
a banc a colombes or with legs. Benches are
sometimes complicated with a marchepied dlong
the front (for it is a good thing to protect the
feet of the sitters from the cold damp pavements
of the halls), and for great persons by a dais,
which is usually a half vault.

The banc ^2iiidi more especially t\iQ archebanc,
is weighty and almost unmovable ; as we have
said, its place is in front of the fire-place. In
order to enable one to warm front or back at
will, and at meals to sit, as the saying went,
'* back to the fire, stomach to the table," the
ingenious banc tournis was invented. This bench
has, for its back, a frame that can play in a
fan-shaped groove cut in the wall of the two side
pieces, so as to shift now to the front now to the
rear. But men find themselves more at ease on
a bench with a back of a good height and a
good solid thickness : they are sheltered thus,
not merely from currents of air but from a
treacherous stroke from behind.

The archebanc may be an integral part of a
bed, backed on to the side. It is then a seat by
day, and at night it serves as a bed step, after the
owner has laid his clothes away in the coflfer.

Diminutives of the banc^ and pretty hard to
distinguish from one another, are the bajicelle^
which seems to have been a light bench, with
low back and side-pieces, or side-pieces without a
back ^ ; the placet^ a name that appears at the
I Fig. 7.

26 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

very end of the Middle Ages ; the escabeau and
the selle, which were sometimes made of a long
plank, with two planks, by way of feet, more or
less cut away and consolidated by means of a
cross-piece, sometimes of a square, round, or
triangular top, mounted on four or three oblique
legs, or else on four or three solid boards put
together so as to form a pyramid under the top.
Simple as they were, these little seats could be
highly decorated with carving. Lastly, the
forme or fourme^ which is not necessarily a
small hanc^ but a very simple one, without back,
without sides, and on four legs. It is this
"form" that later on is to become the banquette^
upholstered and covered with stuff.

Let us go back once more to the common
ancestor, the coffer. Suppose it fairly small,
almost a cube in shape ; raise the two sides
moderately and the back wall considerably, up to
a height of about six feet; there you have the
plan of the chaire or chaiere. This is the seat
of the father of the family, the mark of his
domestic sovereignty. Often there was only one
in a house ; its place was at the head of the bed
in the room of state. It is a thing of majesty
and seldom budges. Is a proof wanted of its
dignity ? We find it in Olivier de la Marche, the
chronicler of Charles the Bold. "The cook
within his kitchen shall command, order, and be
obeyed, and shall have a chaiere between the
buffet and the fire-place, to sit in and to rest if
need is, and the said chaibre shall be placed in

STATELY CHAIRS 27

such a spot as he may see and take cognisance of
all that is done in the said kitchen, and shall have
in his hand a large wooden ladle, the which to
serve him for two ends, the one to taste soup and
broth, the other to drive the children out of the
kitchen and to beat them if need is."

It is quite natural that this lordly seat should
be given the most magnificent habiliments.
Chair es are carved with serviettes (see Fig. 4)
and h orbe-voies (see Figs. 5 and 6), lightened at
the top by an open frieze (see Figs. 4 and 5),
the upper part of the back being the part that
is most richly wrought, because the lower part
is hidden hy lYit parement of stuffs and cushions ;
their uprights have florets for finials ; they are
painted and gilded. Each has its own bouge of
leather, made expressly for it, so that it may
be taken on journeys. Persons of quality,
with rights of high justice and low justice, are
empowered to add a dais to the back of their
chaiere.

These seats of the Middle Ages, such as we see
them in museums, have a sufficiently repelling
air of rude lack of comfort. In very deed, they
were never very comfortable, on account of their
vertical backs ; but they were better than they
seem, because their wood was never left bare and
naked. A carreau or flat cushion of *' camocas *
(Voultre-^ner^'' of red leather *' wrought in the
Moorish fashion," of red sendal * broidered with
pearls, of azure veluyau^ was placed on the seat ;
two others bestrode the arms ; a fourth standing

28 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

up against the back " shored up " your loins ; or
else there was a bear-skin thrown over the chair
or a tapis velu from Turkey ; there were some
even, from the fourteenth century, that boasted
a permanent garniture nailed on with gilt nails,
but this garniture was not stuffed ; the material
covered a seat of stretched hide, lightly up-
holstered with hair, or straps fitted with felting.
For the rest, all furniture was decked out with
bright-coloured stuffs : the bancs were covered
with banqmers, the forms with fourmiers,
escabeaux and selles with flat cushions, buflfets
with Turkey carpet and touailles ; just as the
walls and even the ceilings disappeared under a
profusion of high warp tapestries, of '^ tartare
vermeil changeant et raye cTor^'' or stuff
^^(Tazur.^ brodee h pourcelez (little pigs) blancs^^
or " a bestes sauvaiges et h chasteaulx,^^

PART TWO

FURNITURE OF THE
RENAISSANCE

CHAPTER ONE: HISTORY
AND CHARACTERISTICS OF
THE STYLE

During the sixteenth century the slow trans-
formation of manners and life continued. Con-
ditions of security were gradually becoming more
established — at least until the scourge of the
wars of religion raged through the country —
wealth increased, the expeditions into Italy
brought the rude French to a knowledge of all
kinds of ways of making life pleasant, ways they
had had no idea of ; the taste for luxury spread.
Thus the hiichiers had more and more work
on their benches. The working man and the
peasant continued to have no furniture, but
middle-class people of every grade, always more
and more numerous, grew refined, learned a
taste for conveniences, even for beautiful things,
and without aspiring to lead the Hfe of the gentry,
desired to enjoy, at any rate in their own homes,
all their ease and comforts. So there came into
existence much more plentiful and more varied
furniture, more stationary in its use, more
delicate in construction. But the change was
extremely slow in coming to pass.

We have a very curious document on the
menage or equipment of a house as it was
towards the end of the reign of Francois I. This

31

32 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

is a little book — ^in verse, if you please — of which
one Gilles Corrozet, who kept a booksellers shop
at the sign of the '' Heart and Rose," was both
author and publisher.

The title is : Les Blasons domesttques, con-
tenantz la decoration d'une matson honneste^
et du mesnage estant en icelle : Invention
I'oyeuse^ et moderne^ ^539- On le vend en la
grand salle du Palais, pres la Chappelle de
Messieurs^ en la boutique de Gilles Corrozet^
lib r aire.

Our good Corrozet was no Ronsard, nor even
a Marot ; but his verses, for all their remarkable
flatness, have yet a very pleasant fragrance of
simplicity, and, without being too indulgent, we
might even find in them a certain intimate
poetry. "You have here, my readers," he tells
us in his preface," to recreate your gentle minds,
the descriptions of the household goods and
other things useful for domestic and familiar
affairs, the which I dedicate to you for the
purpose of affording you a pastime." Could
anything be more amiable ? So let us follow
Corrozet. *

The house he is to bring us through from the
cellar

La cave tenebreuse et obscure
Cave dont Bacchus trend la cure

to the garret

Oil on met toutes les relicque%
Des extencilles domtstiques^

X >t -^ , ^'-} I ft

cece^

AN IDEAL HOUSE 33

is the house he himself would fain possess, the new-
fashioned house of a rich burgess.

Noble maison de tons grands hiens garnye^
Riche maison de tons meuhles foiirnye.

First of all the courtyard. It is paved with
marble ; and it is embellished with medallions

Et de figures magnifiques,
Tafit de modernes que d' antiques.
This marble, these antique statues, those
medallions sculptured on the fagade, are the art
of Italy, which is now beginning its invasion.
Behind the house stretches the garden :

Jar din plein de beaute native
^ Ou so7it maints berceaux ombrageux,

and through which run *' silver rills, full of
various fishes," among

, , , le lis^ la rose franche^
Loeillet, et i^aubespine blanche,
La violette humble et petite,
Le doux muguet^ la marguerite^
Le romarin, la marjolaine^
Le baulme qui faict bonne allaine
Et aultres odoriferentes. . . .

Let us go within. The house is no longer
sullen, folded in upon itself, and only presenting
to the street a thick wall as little pierced as
possible, like the houses of the Middle Ages.
Large windows open in the facade, through which
penetrate air and light and gaiety ; good-sized
rooms, " very clear and well-squared," take the

c

34 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

place of the enormous sombre and chilling halls
of the chateaux and seigneurial town mansions
of former times, which were divided off into
compartments as well as possible by means of
tapestries, and the " rat holes and nests," as Henri
Estienne called them, of the cramped houses of
the middle classes, the bourgeoisie.

Corrozet by no means neglects the kitchen ;
indeed,

On a beau voir une maison doree . . .
Si on ne void une bonne cuysine,
II n^y a rien eu la maison qui plaise.
Car la cuisine esjouit etfaict aise
Le corps humain, . . .

However, we will spare our readers of to-day,
and mount at once into the " salle et chambre."
The '' commodites " — what w^e call comfort —
make their appearance here, for

Pour fair e un doux marcher
On a embrisse le plancher.

A wooden floor is a great novelty, and what an
advance on the uneven, damp and chilly pave-
ment of previous days ; but during the whole
of the sixteenth century, and even later, it is a rare
luxury. Furthermore, the chamber is, " nattee
en toute place^^^ which means that the walls have
been hung with rush matting ^ before hanging
the tapestries on them. The tapestries

I This is not; strictly speaking, a novelty,

A POEM 35

Oic on voit les ruses et tours

D'armes, de chasses et d^ amours^

Les boys^ les champs et les fontaines. . . .

Lastly, it is so snug that

, . , le vent rude et divers
N'entre jamais esfroids hyvers.

It is further embellished with pictures ; it is
"gilded . . . painted . . . with richest colours
tinted " ; the doors, the ceiling, the window
frames are covered with painted and gilded
ornament.

Now we come to the furnishings, and our
bookseller-poet takes each article and makes its
hlason^ an invocation and eulogy at the same time.
And first of all the bed.

Beau lict encourtine de soye^
Pour musser la clarte qui nuict^

whose couch is

. . . ouvree de menuiserie
D' images et marqueterie.

The images are statuettes or bas-reliefs ; the
marqueterie is an Italian novelty which is just
beginning to be imitated in France. At the bed-
head the noble chaire has its due and conse-
crated place, the chaire^ " companion of the
couch,"

Chaire enlevee h personyiages^

on which the craftsman carved

36 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

. . . maintes tables d attente*
Fueillages^ vignettes^ frtzures
Et aultres plaisantes figures.

It is a coffer, too, that

1 Chair e bien fermee et bien close
\ Oil le musq odorant repose

Avec le linge delye,

Tant souef^fleurant^ tant bien plyL

Then comes the banc^ ^''faict a petits mar-
mouzetSy^ before which, just as in the full Middle
Ages, the table will be brought and set up for
meals, " on two trestles borne," an article of
furniture that soon will assume such importance,
such extravagant richness, but which is still quite
modest and subordinate : —

Ainsi que la femme prudente

Est au Mary obediente^

Tout ainsi la table sejecte

Vers le banc^ comme ci luy subjecte.

The buffet or dressouer is made of " sweet-
smelling cypress," it is ''low of shape,"

Soustenu de pilliers tournez^
De feuilles etfleurs bien aornez ;

it has

Deux guichetz de bonne taille^
Ayant chascun une medaille ;

it is no longer painted, but made of well waxed
walnut, for Corrozet insists on the sheen given it
from being diligently well kept : this buflfet

A WELL EQUIPPED HOME 37

En clarte le beau mirouer passe^
Pour ce qu^on le tient nectement.

It has none of the features of what we should
call a dining-room piece, for it is

, . , le tabernacle^

Le lieu secret et habitacle

Oil sont les beaux Joy eux et bagiies}

In short, it plays the part that is soon to
belong to the cabinet. The cabinet does already
exist in this ''house in Spain," if we may venture
the phrase, of Corrozet's, and a vignette in the
little book even gives us a portrait of it ; but it
is as yet only a kind of little coffer shaped like a
desk, with compartments, and two little layettes-
coulisses or drawers ; in short, a mere embryo
cabinet. It is the feminine piece in this chamber :

Pare de veloux cramoisy^
De drap dor et de taffetas^

it contains antiquailles, antique objects, portraits
of *' great and little personages," the musk-
perfumed gloves of the lady of the house, pomade
" to bring back lost colour," her

Eaux de Damas^ doeillets^ de roses^
En fiolles de verre encloses ;

her *' patenostres cristallines,"^ her scissors, her
mirror, her book of hours.

In the coffer, *' smelling sweeter than balm,"
are shut away "adornments, trimmings, robes."

1 Baltics, jewels of every kind, and not rings only.

2 Chaplets with beads of rock crystal.

38 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

It is made of '' figured wood, yellow as wax , , .
shining and well rubbed."

The lesser seats are scabe//es, selles and
Placets, the first " to sit at table for dinner and
supper " ; the others more for the ladies' con-
versation. The placet of which Corrozet speaks
is a stool with four legs and a fixed tapestry
covering. There are no caquetoires as yet ;
they were not invented till thirty years later.

Such were, in 1539, ^^^ " chambre et salle^^
of a handsome middle-class house, at one and the
same time a bedroom, a reception room, and
dining room. In more sumptuous dwellings
the chambre and the salle were separate, the
salle being reserved for feasts and ceremonial
occasions.

Our rhymester goes on to speak of the retrait,
as to which

// vaut bien mieiix queje me taise^

he assures us, which yet does not prevent him
from speaking of it — a little too much, and
with no delicacy whatever ; we are in the days
of Master Francois Rabelais. Let us refrain
from following his example, and confine our-
selves to saying that with regard to this par-
ticular point of hygiene and cleanliness the
sixteenth century was distinctly behind the
Middle Ages, as the seventeenth century was
to be behind the sixteenth.

Finally, like the good bookseller he is, he does
not fail to celebrate as it deserves

NOVELTIES 39

La bonne estude^ oil la philosophic
Son throne tient et la se glorifie^

but in terms that are no less vaguely general than
they are enthusiastic, and without giving us any
detail on its furniture, which, in any case, would
not have included anything particular, as lectern
and desk had been long in existence, and special
pieces, such as bookcases and bureaus, were not
yet known.

In short, more than the third part of the
century has passed, and hardly anything has
changed in the general aspect of the furniture in
a house. Capital differences are already displayed
in architecture ; but as for the furniture, the
only changes to be seen are in the style of orna-
ment and decoration. The only new articles'^'
are cabinets, which have made a first and some-
what timid appearance. In technique a novelty
has arrived : polychromy is fading out, the cult
of shining, polished, well waxed, and well rubbed / -
furniture is becoming prevalent. There is a '•
strong leaning towards the effect of reliefs, the
play of lights and shades rather than that of
colours ; it is the complete triumph of carving,
which entails the supremacy of walnut ^ over oak.
And as carving is no longer a costly rarity, furni-
ture is less often hidden under many-coloured
stuffs.

Lastly, marquetry no longer is seen only on

I Walnut is a wood "good and kindly to work, to make fine
pieces of work, because it is smooth and polished of its own
nature."— Charles Estienne, liaison rustique.

40 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

small objects of '* curiosity," curios imported
from Italy or the East. Certosina^ with small
geometrical motives, has long been dethroned
across the mountains by mtarsia, which pre-
tends to rival painting. But it will take a long,
long time to become acclimatised in France. It
had been from the days of antiquity a thing
essentially Italian ; a veneer of some costly
material, or imitating a costly material, set on a
common material — marble or stucco over rubble
in architecture, rare and costly wood on common
wood in joinery — our French artists and crafts-
men will turn away from it always, or for a very
long time. Anne de Beaujeu, her inventory^
tells us, had a " handsome square table, made
with marquetry, on which are several towns
painted with inlaid pieces " — but this had been
"made in Germany," for the Germans very soon
had begun to imitate and even to counterfeit the
works of the intarsiatori of Florence and
Venice. Francois I had a bedstead with mar-
quetry foliage in mother of pearl, but he had
acquired it from a Portuguese merchant, and
moreover, it was Indian work, " du pays
d^Indye^ He had in his service a specially
appointed fnarqueteur, but his name was Gio-
vanni Michele rantaleone ; much later, in 1576,
Henry Ill's was a certain Hans Kraus, whose
name sufficiently indicates his origin. On the
other hand, there is frequent mention, in con-
temporary inventories, of marquetry '* in the

I i.«., 1523

EVOLUTION OF TABLES 41

Spanish fashion." It is true that the admirable
work in inlaid wood that the Cardinal d'Amboise
had made at Gaillon ^ seems to have been carried
out by French workmen.

But inlaying of composition, either white or
coloured, in the Italian fashion — this process was
called white Mauresque — was never to become
acclimatised among us ; still less reliefs in com-
position applique and gilt. Our huchters loved
fine homogeneous and sound material too well
for that. w * c

The real novelties date from the middle of 1 [j^
the century. One of the most important was ^ •**"
the transformation of the table, due to the
increasing need for luxury and convenience. It
is very inconvenient to put down ordinary objects,
or the book one may be reading, on a coffer
placed against the wall ; to leave the whole
centre of a large room empty and void becomes
impossible as soon as there is any care for an
arrangement pleasant to the eye. What can be
put in this space, except a table ? Once the
table is promoted to this dignity, it must be
handsome, decorative, important, and soon the
Renaissance tables will be all three in perfection.
The trestles yield place to a monumental affair
of framework, pillars, and feet, upon which the
table properly so called is permanently placed
in position {assise). From the vulgar improvised
article it had been, only appearing in the chamber
or hall to be hidden under a table cloth, the
I The remains of these may be seen in the choir at St. Denis.

42 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

table became the piece in which decorative
richness displayed itself with the greatest
abundance and even extravagant excess ; you
might think it shows some of the airs of a
parvenue.

The table shares with the cupboard and the
cabinet the inheritance of the coffer, which
disappears very slowly. The cupboards of the
days of Henri II are perhaps the most perfect
things created by the sixteenth century, once the
tradition of the Middle Ages had been com-
pletely abolished. There were some, though
not many, large ones, with only two doors ; the
majority were small, in two sections with four
doors, each of the superposed sections forming
more or less an independent piece, easy to carry
from place to place.

The cabinet, which was not French by birth,
enjoyed a great vogue, but what is curious is that
it never attained a very distinctive personality
in France ; it remains hard to define. Cabinets
were imported from almost everywhere, from
Italy, Germany, Flanders, Spain ; and often
enough were of native make. In several provinces
any cupboard was known as a cabinet ; in Paris
itself we see in Catherine de Medici's mansion
*' a cabinet of wood painted and gilt, of eight feet
high by three feet wide, with four guichets ";
this is a very narrow cupboard, of strange pro-
portions, but beautifully carved. Another has
only ^^un pied en quarre^^ — a coffer. Another
has two feet. At the same period the Due de

CABINETS 43

Roannez had one of "walnut wood with mar-
quetry, six feet high, with four guichets,^^ and
what is an interesting detail, "lined within, in
the upper part, with deep crimson velvet and a
ribbon of silver silk." This too is a cupboard.
The only feature common to all of them is that
they were costly and refined pieces, used to Jock
away, generally in little interior drawers hidden
by the doors, every kind of valuable.

It was not cabinets only that came to us from
abroad. Genoese furniture, of walnut inlaid
with ivory, mother of pearl, lemon or some other
light-coloured wood, much sought after from
1550 onwards, included also arm-chairs, ^^ en
tenaille " ^ and tables ; there were tables with
marquetry "in the German fashion," others
"Indian fashion," or again "Turkish fashion";
the first Florentine tables, '* marquetry of divers
kinds and colours of marble, set upon their under-
frames of gilded wood," which were sent to
Catherine de Medici by her relative, the Grand
Duke of Tuscany, roused general admiration.
Under Henri III, there began to arrive from
Flanders those large cabinets and small cupboards
veneered in ebony, with wavy mouldings,* so
highly prized by the French of the first half of
the seventeenth century, and even bedsteads of
ebony inlaid with ivory. The pamphlet entitled
L Isle des Hermaphrodites^ which so shrewdly

1 X-shaped with curving limbs, the seat and back made of
broad leather bands.

2 We shall speak later of this use of ebony.

44 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

mocks the efFeminate, Italianate and musk-scentcd
manners of Henri III and his favourites, makes
them say : " As for wooden furniture, we would
have it all gilded, silvered, and marquetry : and
the said furniture, and bedsteads in principal,
should be, if that be possible, of cedar-wood and
rosewood and other sweet-smelling woods, unless
it be preferred to make them of ebony and ivory."
We have here a vivid picture of the progressive
denationalisation, if the barbarous but useful
word may be allowed, of costly and luxurious
furniture in France, which was to continue in
more and more aggravated form until the re-
I action of the Louis XIV style.

Let us not fail to remark that all this foreign
furniture has a polychrome surface decoration,
while the French huchiers^ in all that they turn
out, remain faithful to carving in the plain wood ;
we might even say that they abuse it, carry it
J too far.

*l But what passed out of fashion from the end
! of the reign of Frangois I, and most regrettably,
I was the handsome ironwork that made such a fine
effect on the fagades of the buffets and coffers
of the mediaeval style. Thenceforth hinges are
tiny things; there are no more pentures^ or if
there are, they are on the inside ; locks are nailed
on inside the doors, inside the coffers, the key-
hole plates, essential to prevent the key from
damaging the wood, become a mere insignificant
surround.

>:: A-.fc. ^cv **-»./ ■^-*-v->^ * "^ r- f-«.-

END OF GOTHIC 45

There is not a ^' Renaissance " style in France,
but several successive styles overlapping one
another throughout the sixteenth century; one
can even distinguish several provincial styles, but
cautiously and v^ithout attempting to be too
precise. As in the preceding centuries, it is still
architecture that gives the tone, but now it is
lay architecture ; and to each of the phases of
its evolution there corresponds very exactly a
period in furniture, for the huchiers continue to
follow closely and faithfully in the footsteps of
the builders of chateaux.

Gothic art was of a surety neither dying nor
even in its decline towards the year 1500, when
there had just been built, or were actually in the
middle of construction, such masterpieces as the
chateaux of Plessis-les-Tours, Beauge, Mont-
pensier, Meillant, the hotel de Jacques-Coeur at
Bourges, the hotel de Cluny in Paris, the Palais
de Justice at Rouen, the hotel de ville at Com-
piegne, to quote nothing but lay edifices ; the
old tree was full of sap when the Italian bough
was grafted upon it ; and for pure technique, as
for abundant decorative fancy, our master masons
could have taught something to any Bramante or
San Gallo. And thus the real native art made
a good defence against the foreign invasion.

Italian ornament, imitated more or less from

the antique, introduced itself first, and took its

place side by side with the moiichettes and the

soufflets^ the cabbage-leaf, aconite, and thistle-

eaf, in buildings whose structure remained

46 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

purely gothic. This was seen at Solesmes and Am-
boise under Charles VIII, then under Louis XII
at the chateau of Blois, where the fine gallery of
the court alternates on its wholly French pillars
fleur-de-lis and heraldic ermines with panels
showing candelabres*'^ gadrooned vases, acan-
thus stems and symmetrical rinceaux in the
Genoese or Milanese fashion. Among these
sculptures some were the work of Italian artists
in the service of the French king, others were
ordered in Italy itself ; others besides, the most
free and fanciful of these '* travaux de basse
tailhy^ or bas reliefs, were made by the first
French sculptors to be converted to the new
manner.

Wood-working, with, as is natural, a few years
delay, followed in the same path as work in
stone. Then it was that in churches there were
built composite chapels or choirs, the lower blind
part of which, with panels of grotesques ^ is
Italian-antique, while the upper pierced part is
of the pure flamboyant style. This latter style,
by the nervous elegance of its forms, the vertical
or oblique lines soaring gloriously towards the
skies, lent itself far better than the Italian manner
to the effects of light claire-voies, slender finials,
airy crestings, to which men were too well ac-
customed to discard them between one day and
the next. 3 A stall of this kind at the beginning

1 See page 51.

2 See page 51.

3 And yet, on the contrary, a stall at Gaillon, gothic to a
great extent, ends above in a horizontal entablature.

A HYBRID STYLE 47

of the century had, under the seat, a coffer with
folded serviette carving, then a dosseret with
grotesques copied from a vignette out of a
Venetian book, a half-vauh dais with a frieze
carved with Italian rinceaux, and, to crown the
whole, a balustrade of the flamboyant style. A
chaire had, similarly, above a servtette-cdiXYtd
coffer a purely Renaissance back, with pilaster
uprights and a horizontal cornice enframing a
panel covered with motives of the new fashion:
candelabrum, cartouche, medaille* putto,^
pleated ribbons. A frequent combination is
that the framework of the article is in the
French and the panels in the Italian style.

It must be confessed that these hybrid pieces
are often very charming ; the two styles are
brought together with a fancy and an ingenuous
ease that amuse the eye without shocking it by
a too violent lack of harmoniousness. jCs^t^^t-<

A little later, under Francois I,^ a prince much

addicted to novelty, architecture becomes still
further emancipated. It no longer sets national
and Italian elements side by side, it mingles
them intimately together ; and if the main
forms remain, in general, French, many forms

I It is convenient, and in accordance with tradition, when
studying the art of the Renaissance, to divide the sixteenth
century into four periods, which are made to correspond with
the reigns of Louis XII, Francois I, Henri II and Henri III.
This is very arbitrary, for Henri II reigned only twelve years,
and between him and Henri III there interposed the ephemeral
Francois II and Charles IX (who was king longer than his
father), or some fifteen years; on the other hand, Henri III died
in 1589. But on the whole this division corresponds with a
certain reality.

48 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

of the details and the whole of the decoration
belong to the new style. Master workers
still take symmetry somewhat at their ease;
the four corners of a chateau are still rounded
oif with feudal towers; the general silhouette
is, as in the past, picturesque and full of move-
ment, but the calm horizontal line and the
right angle take possession of the fagade ; as
yet there is no coldness, but a general calming
down, contradicted by the riot of upward shapes
that reigns, for example, over the upper parts of
Chambord. Against the steep slopes of the slate
roofs there still detach themselves the slender
chimney stacks and the elegant white dormer-
windows ; but the gables are now replaced by
pointed pediments and crocketed spires by turned
finials. The cabbage-leaf is now only for rabbits
and the thistle for donkeys ; the olive, laurel and
acanthus are triumphant. Now arises that
strange notion which would have so much as-
tonished the carvers of the thirteenth century
capitals — and the great Lorenzo Ghiberti too —
that there are noble vegetables, worthy of a
place in decoration, and others that are unworthy.
And now, at the same time as the latest of the
flamboyant churches, the first Renaissance
churches are erected ; the typical example is
Saint Eustache, a strange edifice of undeniable
beauty, strong and fine, French in Italian
raiment. Here, as in Azay-le-Rideau, at Blois,
or at Chambord, we may see the first serious
attacks delivered among us against good sense ;

UNDER FRANCOIS P^ 49

the tall piers of the nave are plastered with
pilasters and columns, each with base and capital,
placed one above the other.

This ' ' Francois P*"'' art is at bottom truly
French^ vivid, varied, full of gaiety and fanc y,
and yet almost always reasonable too, transform-
ing in its own fashion what it borrows from
strangers and everywhere showing the most
delicate sense of elegance . French artists had
not then lost, and were never to lose the
assimilating genius, in the full meaning of the
word, which they had already shown in the end
of the fourteenth century, when they elaborated
the Enghsh ''Decorated" style to make of it
that completely French thing, the Flamboyant
style.

The art of furniture followed in the movement ,

and we might carry to considerable lengths the

parallel between a buffet with canted corners

belonging to this period, similar in structure to

those made under Louis XI, but not one part of

it now showing gothic ornament, and one of

those dormers which, at a hundred yards distance,

you would swear are flamboyant, but in which

there is not a single element not carved in the

Italian fashion. A chaire still has the stiff an d

imposing forms that have not changed for a

"hun dred years, but the back, for example, has

pilasters fo r the upri ghts, and for crown a p edi-

TStnx over a iri ezc"with canatix* or flutings ;

its panel a nd those of the coffer that still form s

the seat are decorated with a laureate medallion
— g —

so LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

and candelabra flanked by do lphins, whose tails
end in rinceaux of acanthus.

Of course furniture did not all, at a fixed date
2Lnden hloc^ assume this new decoration and aspect ;
there were ver y many bel ated pieces which, in
1540, had not yet resigned themselves wholly
to abandon their '' folded parchments " and scaly
pillars with bases like a prismatic carafe. Also,
and this is important, these pieces were neve r
a copy of Italia n pieces. Our huchiers always
created the architecture of their own works ; but
for ornament they made use of everything that
came before their eyes : bas-reliefs of stone and
marble, bronze plaques, vignettes in books, en-
gravings, book-bindings. Everything is good to
them, and they show the utmost ingenuity in
profiting by everything.

Renaissance decoration thenceforth was__in
possession o f all its f ormulas, what we migTit call
Its *' vocabulary." That vocabulary is made up
of Italian elements, but Frenchified with the
s a,_me unceremon i ousness as was displayed m
changing a Bernardino of Brescia, an artist from
the other side of the Alps in the king's service
as " worker in wood and marquetry of all colours,"
into Bernardiyi de Brissac I It is now the
proper moment to compile a very summary
lexicon of this language of ornament.^

The pilaster ^ is found almost everywhere. In

I. We will speak a little later of the motives borrowed direct
from ancient architecture.
2 Figs. 16 and 17.

GROTESQUES 51

its most simple form it is reduced to a narrow
vertical panel, framed by a moulding, in the
midd le decor ated with a circle, and at the tw o
ends with two semi-circles, or a lozenge and t wo
triangles . Pay heed to this modest lozenge ^, it
will make its way in the world, for it sometimes
serves as base to a projection in the shape of a
very squat pyramid, which is already the
*' diamond-point " dear to the joiners of the next
century.

In a richer form,^ '' carved with enrichments,"
as they said, the pilaster, like panels,^ admits the
whole family of ornaments called grotesques, or
arabesques, for the two were and are still com-
monly confounded. In reality the name of
" arabesque " should be reserved for a surface
ornamentation, very fully covering the surface,
made up of more or less geometrical interweavings
of a flat uniform band. A panel or a pilast er of
grotesques is a decorative whole, most commo nly
composed of rinceaux^ developed s ymmetrically
on b oth sides of a vertical axis, formed by a
candelabrum (a motive figurmg a kind of
superpos ition of turned balusters so metime s
terminatmgln a torch flame),* a vase^ra vasqiie ,
or by the cord of a chute, w hich proceeds from
out of the mouth o f a masc aron^ a cherub^s

1 Which is also found carved on panels (Fig. 12).

2 Fig. 16.

3 Figs. 9, 12, 16.

4 Fig. 9, panel on the right(much simplified)

5 Fig. 9, on the left.

6 Fig. i6.

52 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

head,^ or a kno t o f ribbon.^ The rtnceaux, whose
slender stems carry acanthus leaves or smallag e,
very greatly altered in shape, often end in hea ds
ol animals ^ or cornucopias ]

There enters besides into the composition of
grotesques a vyhole real or fantastic fauna : swans,
dolphins,^ chimseras and monstrous beings of
every kind, sphinxes, sirens, griffons, and also the
human figure in the shape of male or female
torsos, with arms or without, ending in acanthus
stems, out of which spring rinceaux ; and tar-
gets ^ in the Italian fashion, rectangular cartouches,
broader than their height, called ecriteaiix^ even
when they are innocent of an inscription, and
a crowd of other objects, such as the bobbin
and the knife carved above the baluster-shaped
supports of the buffet shown in Fig. i6.

The capitals of pilasters are usually a very free
rendering of the composite capitals o f the
Roman s ; we recognise their upright acantlius-
leaf and the volutes.^

Other motives are the broad oval, or tnirror^
often surrounded with entrelacs ^ ; the frieze of
entrelacs^ the cartouche en cuir decoupe and
enrolled ^ ; the garland of flowers, foliage, and

1 Fig. 12.

2 Fig. 1 6, in the middle.

3 Fig. i6.

4 Fig. 9.

5 Shields of a particular shape.

6 Fig. 1 6,

7 Fig. 8.

8 Fig. 8.

9 Fig. 9, the middle.

MEDALLIONS 53

fruits (then called frinctage), often very thin ^ ;
the perspective d^ architecture ^ ; the medaille
or medallion, hig hly characteristic of the peri od
o f Francois I . although it was already in favour
under Louis XII ; witness the chateau de
Gaillon and the hotel d'AUuye at Blois. This
was a head or bust in profile ^ or full faced "^ of a
man, a warrior helmed and bearded, like Hannibal,
or of a woman. Certain of these heads, carved
almost in alto-reUevo, seem to be leaning out of
an oeil-de-bxuf. Their frame is generally round
and composed of a wreath of foliage ^ or of a
turned moulding,^ sometimes it is lozenge-
shaped/ The CO quill ed or shell, most of ten
serves to ornament the top of a niche . The
bander ole turns and folds in a thousand ways ;
it takes the form of an S,^ for instance, or
becomes incorporated in a rinceau}^ In general,
^* work with heads and figures ''was callea taille ^
and all ^^work of foliage, branching, rosettes '*
was known as enrichissement .

But we must confine ourselves within limits ;
we should never come to an end of enumerating
all the motives adapted so happily to their own

1 Fig. 10, at the top of the left-hand panel.

2 Fig. 16, greatly simplified, and reduced to an arcade whose
uprights are figured in perspective.

3 Figs. 25 and 26»

4 Fig. 10.

5 Fig.-a$, in this case curiously conventionalised.

6 Fig. 10.

7 Fig.-«6r

8 Fig. 21, in the pediment.

9 Fig. 21, on the sides of the pediment.

\0 Syn^mit of back of the same chair, Fig, ^l,

54 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

technique and to French taste by the " tailleurs
de bois,'*^ the wood carvers of this delightful
period.

By the end of the reign of Frangois I a style of
architecture that was no longer Franco-Italian,
but already classical and tainted with the be-
ginning of pedantry, had shown itself in the
buildings constructed for the king. Fontainebleau
and Saint-Germain are already very different
from Chambord and Blois. In the first of
these chateaux the oval court has a colonnade
and a portico with a double row of pillars, like
veneering, in front of a staircase ; the dormers
are capped with correct Greek pediments, while
within the Italians intermingled their stucco and
painting all along the sumptuous galleries. At
Saint-Germain we see a building that is more
bizarre than beautiful cover itself with a flat
terrace with a balustrade — a sheer absurdity for
our climate.

Some years later, and behold, the architects
— no longer masters of the work, but architects,
a Greek name that has a fine sound — ^have
finally turned their back, alas ! for centuries,
on the national tradition. With complete im-
perturbability, burrowing in Vitruvius and
pillaging Bramante or Scamozzi, taking as their
models the monuments of the two Roman
Decadences, they will make correct use of the
orders — the five sacred orders. They will see
in a column not a support, but a casual ornament
to be clapped on top of anything, that may be

THE NEW TASTE 55

redoubled and superimposed with no reason, or
that can be magnified to gigantic proportions,
and which carries nothing at all. Above their
windows they will alternate indefinitely the
eternal triangular pediment and the unescapable
circular pediment. Incontestable masterpieces,
such as that part of the Louvre which was by
Pierre Lescot and Jean Goujon, and vigorous ll
reactions, here and there, of the French good "•
sense, do not prevent the fact that cold solemnity,
monotonous common-place, tiresomeness, and to
speak bluntly, untruthfulness, little by little took
possession of the art of building, in which the '
French race had so triumphantly excelled for the
previous four centuries.

And what of furniture ? Costly furniture
conforms itself, towards the middle of the century,
to the new taste, but happily only very ap-
proximately.

It is now the structure itself which is pro-
foundly modified. We can recognise, especially
in the armotres— which, then, with cabinets,
came to be the fashionable pieces, to the
detriment of the buffets^ while the slow decay
of the coffer proceeded — the greater part of the
elements of this new architecture, which to-day
we call classic. The pilaster continues to be
much employed, but it is correctly fluted, set on
a base and surmounted by a moulding that copy
sufficiently closely the *' Tuscan" base and
capital. Glance at the buffet with three doors
reproduced in Fig. 1 7, which dates from the end

u/

56 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

of the sixteenth century ; is it not a reduced
copy of the fagade of a building, with a covered
gallery on the ground floor, two orders of pilasters
one above the other, with their entablatures
interrupted by consoles all alike ? Even in the
detail of the carved decoration, do we not
discover architectural elements, as cornices,
triglyphs, bits of circular pediments ? Another
very marked characteristic — it is above all a
decorative piece ; the keyholes are disguised as
much as possible, the hinges completely; the
drawers are only betrayed by the little iron drop
handles, then known as heurtoirs de layettes^
almost lost among the carving.

The small cupboard in two sections, shown in
Fig. 14, so fine, so pretty, and so pure in line,
is likewise a miniature building in two stories ;
its pillars with base and capital almost Tuscan
swell in accordance with the rules, are set on
stylobates, and in each story carry a kind of
entablature with simplified consoles. The
fronton entrecoupe, triangular or sometimes
circular, is almost de rigueiir. A great number
of these cupboards no longer retain it, because it
was detachable and easily broken, or else it has
been remade ; but we can perceive that they
were intended to have this crown by the fact
that we find the mortises in which the tenons
of the pediment were inserted. When one
considers it, this fronton entrecoiipe or hrise
appears absurd ; it has a baroque air and presents
a very angular and disagreeably jagged outline ;

ARCHITECTURAL FURNITURE 57

it was a wretched invention of the decadent
architects of Italy, speedily adopted by our own.
The break in it is equipped with a very tiny
edifice with a niche, intended to shelter a
statuette, and crowned in its turn with a pediment
either entire or itself also interrupted. And
the cornice too may be interrupted as well. We
must notice that the pillars have no carrying
function; they are like those on chateaux and
churches, mere superadded ornaments, whose
removal would in no way injure the solidity of
these cupboards.

Such a piece of furniture, '^ tout d'' archi-
tecture^' according to the expression in con-
temporary inventories, would be insufferably
pedantic if the joiner had sought to conform to
the laws of Vitruvius and Vignole ^ ; but he
interprets them and suits them to his own notions,
pushes the rules aside, changes proportions
without scruple, so that his work remains living
and personal.

Pilasters and columns are not the only real or

apparent supports made use of in this period in

furniture making. Balusters, both round and

flat, play their part too, but much more as table

legs and supports or uprights of panelled furniture ;

the different species of the genus caryatid, in

I The age of architectural theory has begun. V Architecture, / \i\
OH art lie bien bastir, (ie Marc Vitruve . . . mis de latin en franfois ' >

par Jean Martin, appeared in 1547, with an Epistrc an lecteiir and
engravings by Jean Goujon, "student of architecture"; in 1568,
\ht Rtgle generate (V Architecture dcs cinq maniiresdecolonnes . . ,
par Philibert de VOrme, conseiller et aulmosnier du Roy, et abbe de
Saint-Serge; in 1570, the Trait<f d* Architecture de Palladia, etc,

58 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

which we include, not merely statues bearing
weight, but the terminals and the monstrous
beings more or less copied from the antique,*
sphinxes and satyrs, tritons, griffons, chimaeras,
and all imaginable variations of these typical
shapes, as well as their combinations with
vegetable forms. The joiners in certain pro-
vinces made much greater use than in others of
these human and animal figures ; which leads us
to say a word or two here about the provincial
schools of joinery during the second half of the
sixteenth century.

In his book, h Meuble en France au XVP
Steele^ Bonaffe was the first who, thirty-five
years ago, took pains to establish a ''geography "
of French furniture in the Renaissance period.
His zeal as explorer was unbounded, and his
method was by no means a bad one, but he
wanted to prove too much, and showed himself
over precise and categorical ; it would be rash to
follow him in all his conclusions. It is more
prudent to stop, as M. Deshairs did in his
excellent chapter of Andre Michel's great
Histoire de lart^ at distinguishing two great
regions with vague boundaries, one of which
would include the county of the Loire, the
Ile-de-France, and if necessary Normandy, the
other Burgundy and its surrounding districts,
southern Champagne, Lyonnais, Franche-Comte.^

1 Figs. 1 8 and 19.

2 We still find, to quote an example, a number of Norman
coffers (see Fig, 1 1) which present certain features commonly

THE BURGUNDIAN STYLE 59

In the first of these two regions taste is finer,
more Attic, so to say ; the lines of construction
are well marked, calm and rhythmic ; the structure
is more logical, the sense of proportions often is
exquisite. The carving is sober, localised, well ^f •
distributed, contained within very firm enframing |/:"'
lines ; the repos or plain surfaces enhance its //
effect. It is usually in very low relief, and its (/j
execution is of the most supple refinement.
Panels in low relief are universal, with their
long, fluid, nude figures, their draperies with a
thousand soft folds, carved by artists dominated
by the influence of Jean Goujon, while in the
architectural part of the piece we can recognise
the influence of Pierre Lescot, Jean BuUant and
Philibert de I'Orme.

In Burgundy — where the art of stonework
produced so many vigorous masterpieces — and
what may be called its artistic annexes, carving
on furniture developed exuberantly, almost
stifling the architecture under its own abund-
ance ; everywhere with its accentuated reliefs it
overflows the lines of construction. It was
Burgundy that saw the triumph, as uprights and
supports, of terminals with shafts twined with
branchy foliage, and all the wildest monsters,
chimaeras with enormously long necks, baroque
griflBns made with a lion's paw, a woman's bosom
and an eagle's head. The eye cannot find a
square inch of surface to rest upon that is not

ascribed to the Burgundian school; the use of caryatids at the
comers the carving of flat arabesques on mouldings,

6o LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

" carven with enricliments " ; not a moulding,
not a piece of turned work is left bare without
the carver's chisel dealing with it. All this, it
must be confessed, falls into a rather tiresome
brilliance when the joiner was not a craftsman
of the highest merit, and does not shine by the
purity of its taste. A small cupboard from the
Ile-de-France is like a perfect sonnet by Ronsard ;
a good buffet of Dijon, carved under Charles IX,
is like a page of Rabelais, whose unbridled spirits
combine the worst possible taste with genius.

But if their conception is not free from re-
proach, the execution of the best Burgundian
pieces is superb, full of life and feeling, of the
keenest energy with unpremeditated turns found
with the point of the tool as it moved, a fine
freedom in the stroke of the gouge in the sub-
stantial walnut. And when these qualities of
workmanship are joined with a well thought out
composition, with simple lines, as in the most
perfect productions of the Lyons workmen,^ the
piece then achieves a beauty superior perhaps to
that of the most exquisite cupboards of Touraine
or Paris, because it is impossible to reproach it
with the least touch of chilliness.

Dijon had one industrious kuc/izer, Hugues
Sambin, ''^ architect eiir et maistre meniiisier^'

I The student should see, in the Arconati-Visconti room at
the Louvre, a walnut Lyons buffet of admirable harmoniousness
and elegance, and compare it with its neighbour, a large cup-
board in pine, all gilded and painted in polychrome, the richness
of whose decoration is all but overpowering, and which probably
came from the workshop of Sambiq.

HUGUES SAMBIN 6i

designer and engraver of ornaments, all at one and
the same time. Unhappily there remains no
piece that can with certainty be attributed to
him ; his only authentic works are the enclosure
of the Palais de Justice and a small door, at
Dijon. In 1572 he printed at Lyons a collection
of thirty-six plates engraved on wood, entitled
Livre de la diversite des Termes dont on use
en architecture^ rediiit en ordre par maistre
Hugiies Sambin, architecteur en la ville de
Dijon. This series of somewhat clumsy ter-
minals, with shafts overloaded with ornament,
had a very great influence in the district, and
must have circulated for a long time in the
workshops of the joiners. Sambin can be re-
proached with a certain turgidness of style, but
his chisel was endowed with the qualities of
expressive and dramatic vigour in the highest
degree.

That once said, at the very most we may add
that a very bold, almost brutal execution, often
inaccurate in its rendering of the human figure,
seems to characterise furniture carved in
Auvergne ; that the southern provinces de-
lighted to carve knightly horsemen on the panels
of their cupboards ; that Normandy made great
use of oak, much more than the other provinces —
and we had better stop at that.

The provincial schools were of no long
duration, and in the last quarter of the century
a real unification of style was observed, due in
great measure to the collections of engraved

62 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

models that were multiplied and disseminated
everywhere. If the best known are those of
Jacques Androuet, called Du Cerceau, there
were many others, often anonymous. Du
Cerceau was not a specialist in wood like Sambin,
but a theoretician and practitioner in archi-
tecture, a designer and engraver of ornaments
for every kind of craft. He published, like so
many others, a Livre de P Architecture, a
Petit traite des cinq ordres, a collection of
Fragmens antiques^ but also plates of orna-
ments for no special purpose : Grotesques^
Cartouches^ Fleurons^ Termes, Nielles\ and
models for various crafts : Bijoux^ Serrurerie,
Orfevrerie d''eglise^ Fonds de coupes^ Mar-
queterie^ and lastly Meubles. His plates of
furniture — buffets, cabinets, tables, beds and
benches — do not, it must be confessed, make
any very favourable impression ; they are both
complicated and cold, and most frequently they
are impossible to carry out. Still, it would not
be just to reproach him either for the com-
plicated nature or the impracticability of his
engravings ; they are not models intended to be
copied exactly as they are, but rather what we
should call suggestions, ideas destined, as he
^. himself puts it in one of his dedications, to
i; "awaken the minds" of the craftsmen and not
j \ to spare them the trouble of creating ; and if the
ornaments are always so multifold and com-
plicated, it was because he meant to give in the
smallest possible space many motives that could

OTHER MOTIVES 63

be used on many pieces of furniture. In the
next century the Le Pautres, the Marots and
Berains will have no different conception of
their part as designers of ornamentation.
Accordingly, it is impossible to find any piece of
furniture that is even a simplified realisation of
a model by Jacques Androuet ; but there was
hardly a workshop, from Burgundy to Normandy,
and from the Ile-de-France to Languedoc, that
escaped his influence.

Among the motives ordinarily carved on the
furniture of the second half of the sixteenth
century, we must further note the plume^ an
ornament elongated and standing upright,
resembling, if you like, a bird's wing feather, but
also like a leaf ; there might also be seen in it a
conventionalisation and impoverishment of the
acanthus ^ ; the masque of a woman standing
out against a drapery ^ and decorating the middle
of a panel, either plain or broidered with
arabesques ; the mnfle de lion^ or lion's face,
similarly placed ; the eagle with outspread wings,
holding a garland in his beak ; the winged
cherub's head,^ which becomes a design-of-all-
work ; it adorns the middle of a bare frieze or
softens its corners, under those of the cornice it

1 Fig. 13, on the pedestals of the terminals ; Fig. 23, on the
sidepieces ; Fig. 24, on the legs ; Fig. 30, on the flat baluster of
the back.

2 A masque was a human face seen full and offering no
grotesque or monstrous features ; a inascaron was a head showing
such features.

3 Fig. 14.

64 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

serves to make the capital of a pillar, to ring it
round the middle, etc., etc.

Under the melancholy reign of Henri II I, ^
France, devastated by her civil wars, saw all
her arts undergoing a real crisis; architecture
languished, and furniture was incontestably in
decay. The carvers' inspiration and vigour were
exhausted, they were repeating themselves and
growing heavy-handed. Presently sculpture
becomes impoverished, and the huchier calls on
white inlayings (composition, bone, mother-of-
pearl) to give him easier and coarser effects
of richness ; now it disappears completely, and
we see those pieces of an amazing dryness,
which are nevertheless encumbered with useless
and meaningless details, on which long-necked
balusters crowd with neither rhyme nor reason,
and frail and over-long pillars ; again, it grows
heavy, becomes flabby and vulgar, in this betray-
ing the Flemish influence which is beginning to
make itself felt.

The coming of Henri IV put an end to the
wars of religion and thus restored some security
to commerce. At once the importation of
foreign furniture increased, cabinets from
Germany and Flanders, Flemish seats and tables,
and soon Spanish also. The charming art of
the Renaissance was to prolong a precarious
existence up to the end of the Louis XIII period;
but it was already stricken to death by the last
years of the sixteenth century.

I 1575-1589.

CHAPTER II : THE
DIFFERENT ARTICLES OF
FURNITURE

One of our good story-tellers of the sixteenth
century, Noel du Fail, seigneur de la Herissaye,
a gentleman of Brittany, in his Discours
d^aucims propos rustiqttes, facetieux^ et de
singuliere recreation, describes as follows a
filerie, or spinning-room, in the Breton fashion :
" The girls, with their distaffs on their hips, were
spinning, sitting on a raised place upon a huche,
in long rows "... while " Jehan, Robin, or
some other gay bachelor, drumming with his feet
on a coffer, said little nothings to Jehanne or
Margot." So that coffers were still serving as
seats, but this was in Brittany; where civilisa-
tion was more advanced it was no longer usual ;
" drumming with the feet " would very speedily
have chipped off the carvings in high relief that
were then lavished on them by the hiichiers, and
would have knocked away the terminals or
caryatids fastened on v^ith much expenditure of
glue and dowels.

These very ornate Renaissance huches, so large
and so heavy, are no longer made so as to be
easily transported ; they are state pieces ; but
there are always plenty of coffres de bahut for
travelling, kept in a galerie, a retrait, or in the

65 E

66 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

galetas (the garret). The king of Navarre,
Antoine de Bourbon, the father of Henri IV —
an orderly gentleman, it seems, and meticulously
particular — had ten merely for the ''joyaux et
pterreries de son cabinet^^ ; each had received
a name : Abraham, Jacob, Esau, Job, Moses . . .
and the boxes they contained v^ere labelled in
their turn, the first was fe crois . . . the second,
en Dieu . . . the third, le Pere . . . the
fourth, tout-puissant . . . and so on.

The better to show off the fine carved coffers,
and so that it might be more conveniently
possible to get at what was packed away in them,
it became usual to raise them by means of a base
or pedestal, the support de coffre^ or a low table,
whose very short legs were carved like lions' paws,
and hence they were called /a//^^ de bahut.

The way of making them with narrow panels ,
divided by upright pieces either plain or sca ntily
o rnamented.^ went out of fashion at the end of
the reign of Frangois I . Thenceforth coffers were
to have in their fagade rather a single large
carved panel, flanked with two pilasters, engaged
balusters or caryatids,^ or else a large panel
between two narrow panels, the fagade then
presenting four pilasters or caryatides ; or two
similar panels and three pilaster uprights.^ In
this last case, there seems at first sight hardly
any difference between a coffer and a lower or

1 Figs. 8 and 12.

2 Fig. II.

3 Fig. 10.

COFFER AND CUPBOARD 67

upper cupboard, and it has happened that one
has been turned into the other.

Coffers of medium or small size, very ornate
in more or less Italian style (carving, painting,
inlaying, white mores que), provided with a
rounded lid, and frequently mounted on four
lion feet, are old marriage chests, the receptacle
for the bride's presents.

We have said that cupboards tended more and
more to take the place of coffers ; which means
that they are infinitely more convenient, and
also much mgre decorative, more furnishing
{7neublantes). The most finished type of Re-
naissance furniture is the small cupboard in two
sections, with four guichets and pediment
entrecoupe,'^ which the workshops of the Ile-de-
France and Touraine produced under Henri II
and Charles IX. The upper part is a little less
wide and less deep than the lower; the whole
shape is quite architectural. These delicious
cupboards most frequently have corner columns
on each section, sometimes twin columns ; elegant
pillars, with proper entasis, with bases and capitals
almost exactly in conformity with the Tuscan,
Ionic or Corinthian canon. But there are some
without pillars, or with pillars on the upper part,
and flat uprights on the lower. The one we
choose for reproduction (Fig. 14) — one of the
gems of the Musee des Arts decoratifs — is of the
most refined artistry, and in proportions absolutely
right. It might perhaps be reproached with a
I Fig. 14.

68 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

semblance of clumsiness in the figures of naked
goddesses that adorn the doors. These doors
are much wider than they seem, for they occupy
the whole width of the fagade, the hinges being
pushed back on to the sides, hidden behind the
corner pillars. The piece is as though enlivened
by the most delicate polychromy ; the pillars
are turned out of a very dark walnut, all the rest
is of light walnut ; twenty small plaques of
black marble finely veined with white, surrounded
with a fillet of lemon wood, are inlaid in the
wood in places most judiciously chosen^ ; the
pedestals of the lower pillars are decorated with
the same lemon- wood fillets ; all the carving is
gilt, and the gold, deadened by the lapse of time,
and half obliterated in places, is of an exquisite
softness and quiet ; the key plates and the
little drop handles of the four drawers are of
iron half denuded of gilding.

There were of course other types of cupboards ;
with two unequal sections, but of more squat
porportions ^ ; cupboards narrow and high, with
two equal sections, each with only one door and
no pediment ; with two equal sections, broad,
with four doors and no pediment ; these last are
very like two coflfers one on top of the other,
and that is their actual origin, which is recalled,
in the French provinces bordering on Germany,

1 These inlays of foreign material — a wholly Italian fashion —
are very debatable in principle ; it must be admitted that in this
instance the effect is a very happy one.

2 Fig. 13, this one is incomplete, it should have been crowned
with a pediment.

BUFFETS 69

by huge hanging iron handles fixed at the sides
of the upper section as well as the lower ;
cupboards in one single section with two doors,
which are much rarer ; and lastly, those of a
complicated and rather irrational architecture ^
which appeared at the end of the century. In
general, it is possible to recognise those that
never had a pediment^ by their more highly
developed cornice.

As for aulmoires a quatre estages, or even
three, and those that had ten or more guichets,
these were of course fixed cupboards, built into
the garde- robe or clothes closet.

The biiffet or dressoir — the wording of the
inventories of the time proves that the two
words were synonymous — also takes to itself the
most diverse shapes. It is, in fact, a piece of
all-work found indiscriminately in the hall, the
chamber, the retrait, the study, or the kitchen.
In principle it is a cupboard in two parts, low,
and with no doors in the lower section ; by far
the great majority are made in this fashion ; but
others are buffets sans fenestres pour servir en
salle, or buffets sans guichets, a simple super-
position of three shelves upheld by pillars or
balusters one above the other, the uppermost
shelf thickened by a little cornice, the middle
one by two drawers, the lower forming the base ;
a meuble de montre only serving to display

1 Figs. I and 5.

2 For our vocabulary we may note that pediments were called
fronlispices or chapiteaux.

70 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

plate, not to lock it up ; others, on the contrary,
are entirely closed, with four doors ; or else the
doors are below and the open part above, but
this last arrangement is very rare.

Buffets of the first type might themselves
assume very different aspects. The greatest
diversity occurs among those belonging to Bur-
gundy, a province in which the sometimes a trifle
wild fantasy of the carvers bent the architecture
of the piece to their own caprices. The Renais -
sance buffet ordinarily has a base, sometime s
fitted with drawer s, resting direct on the grou nd
or on balls, ^ sometimes flattenecj, sometimes left
roundr^uFes,^ or lions' paws. From the base
rise two, three, or four uprights, which are ,
according to the Jegree of richness of the piece ,
and al so its o rigin, turned balusters with o r
without carvi ng^; pilasters or pillars, either plain

or fluted or carved ; terminals, chimaera-car y-

atides. . . . The upper part is often subdivided
into two unequal stories by a horizontal mould-
ing of high projection ; drawers form the
entresol^ so to speak, of the little edifice ; above
are the doors, two or three in number, according
to the width. Certain large Burgundian buffets,
without corner uprights, have their upper part
supported in the middle by a narrow cupboard,
on each side of which chimaeras or other large
carved motives, like those of tables, act the part

^i Fig. 17.

2 Fig. 16.

3 Fig- 16.

THE "CREDENCE" 71

^f consoles and redeem the excess of width in
the upper part. This is not particularly success-
ful. Finally, the buffet may terminate in a
withdrawn cresting, a kind af dossier prolonging
' the back wall, with a shelf on the cornice, or
shaped like a circular pediment. A shape com-
monly found at the very end of the style, and one
that was to persist into the seventeenth century,
I is that of the buffet with the upper part wide,
low, and supported by two heavy balusters of
iCarafe-shape.^

Some one may perhaps be surprised not to
find the credence in this enumeration. This
word, like hahiit^ has for now nearly a century
had a quite undeserved good fortune. Is it
considered more elegant than hiiffet ? That was
the opinion of the fops of the days of Henri III,
who brought it into fashion because it was
Italian. It was then gradually forgotten ;
nevertheless Furetiere, at the end of the seven-
teenth century, included it in his dictionary, but
assigned it its proper meaning : " a buffet set up
{qiCon dresse) in the houses of the gentry, on
which is placed all their silver plate, on show,
when they are at table." It was not, properly
speaking, a true piece of furniture, but a
temporary structure of shelves made of simple
boards, altogether hidden under cloths, to display
plate on days of " ceremonious dinners." In
Basse-Provence alone — which is explained by
the nearness of Italy — ^the word never ceased to
I Fig. 39.

72 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

be in current use to indicate low buffets of the
type known as Arlesian.

The cabinet is, like the credence, an Italian
thing with an Italian name, but of earlier
importation. The " cabinet-piece " and the
" cahinet-meuhle " have this in common, that
they are relatively of small dimensions, and both
of them contain one's costliest and rarest
possessions/ The smallest cabinets-meubles, as
we have seen, are a kind of coflfer, opening either
with two doors or a single flap, which is held on
the level by bastons de fer or iron rods that
pull out, and serves as a writing table ; the
interior is composed of a certain number of small
drawers. Other larger cabinets are coffers v^th
two iron handles, and are placed on trestles or
on an under-frame made for the purpose ; others
are real cupboards in two sections, or buffets ;
these latter can only be distinguished by actually
opening them, for what characterizes them all is
the elegance, the preciousness of their interior,
and especially their subdivision into a quantity of
small drawers, with frequently a tabernacle in
the middle. Are they part of a widow's furniture ?
In that case they are ebony outside, and inside
done with black velvet with silver galoons and
plaques. But they are never, so to say, quite
altogether French ; made in the fashion of

I We read in the Didionnairc of Nicot (the doyen of French
dictionaries was compiled by the gentleman who introduced
tobacco into France): "a woman's cabinet: all the varieties of
ornaments, jewels and trinkets she has to accoutre and preen
herself."

I

THE TABLE 73

Genoa, or Germany, or Florence, they are inlaid
with bone, with ivory, with mother-of-pearl ;
Queen Louise, the wife of Henri III, had one of
"lapis and agate, covered with carnation velvet
and silver embroidery, with the said lady's
initials."

When the table was made to remain per-
manently in the hall or the chamber, it regularly
assumed the following shape : the top, usually
with extending pieces, is '^ assise " upon a carved
ceintiire^ often this is a torus''*' or perhaps a
quadrantal moulding with gadroons,^ resting at
each end on a substantial fan-shaped support,
very ornate, with undulating outline, made of two
scrolls or two chimaeras back to back ; these sup-
ports stand up from two patins joined by a
massive cross-piece that serves as a foot-rest for
the diners ; these tables are especially meant for
meals. The cross-piece carries an arcading with
pillars, or a heavy ornamental pierced motive.
It is very decorative, but a little clumsy and
*' loud." If the two ends are by far the most
highly ornamented parts, it is because the rest
was hidden by the placets^ escabelles and
tabourets, which were put back under the table
between meals, and which were looked upon as
its accessories ; the phrase ran, *' a table with its
escabelles.''^ . . . These were in turn hidden
by a tapestry or carpet, the ends of which hung
low over the long sides of the table, but left the
two ends of the table clear and showing.
I Fig. 18.

74 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

Smaller tables present a similar arrangement,
though simplified ^ ; others have as their supports
pillars, whose bases rest on a kind of pedestal in
the form of a double cross, if there are six pillars,^
and if eight, on a double cross potencee * at its
two extremities ; this pedestal itself rests on six
or eight ball feet.
/ / Other varieties are : the round, square, or
\ ^fl octagonal table with big central leg, altogether
Itahan ; the camp table, '' placed on a trestle that
folds up," and the table that itself folds up 3;
lastly, the special table for games: '' a jeii de
dames dessus " (chess table), and " cl jeu de
tables,'' ^

To sum up then, the table, from 1550 to 1600,
is generally more complicated than other piece s
ot turniture, treer m composition, and above all ,
more Italian of aspect. " The reason is tha t
huchiers^ where tables were concerned, were

wi thout traditions to restrain them and to fight
against the influence of the collections of some "-
v^at wild models, such as those of Androuet du
Cerceau.

But that was a question of luxurious pieces,
and it goes without saying that simpler tables
were made when the movable top on trestles
went out of fashion even in the homes of modest
middle-class folk ; they were set on four piliers

1 Fig. 19.

2 Fig. 20.

3 Foreshadowing the aspect of the seventeenth century tables,
reproduced in Figs. 60 and 61.

4 Trictrac.

BEDS 75

tournoyes (legs in the shape of turned columns),
joined together at the bottom either by a rect-
angular frame, or by a stretcher either H-shaped
or X-shaped, with or without a centre column ;
in short, already they were '* Louis XIII tables,"
just as the simple tables of the end of the seven-
teenth century were still "Louis XIII tables."

Let us^ dd^th^^ Renaiss ance tables are always ^
very high7 because ijtjp ^at7j2J_those da ys aT?
appreciably high eF tha n those of to-day .

The beds of this period are to-day so rare that
we have hardly anything to say about them.
Their tester was not hung from the ceiling, but
carried by four pillars, which were highly or-
namented with turnings and carvings,^ or even
replaced by terminals, caryatides, for they were
in full view ; the curtains, as in the Middle
Ages, continued to be pulled back during the
day. The dossier was always a piece of abund-
ant and complicated decoration. It was only
at the very end of the sixteenth century that
people began to prefer beds, every part of which,
including the pillars, was covered with the most
magnificent stuffs.

Let us go on to the seats. The great banc ^
dossier disappeared from private ptprinr^^ after
the reign ot .b rangois j^ at least in its quality as
seat ot honour ; banished from hall and chamber ,
relegated to the antechamber and the kitchen, it
IS no longer embellished either with taille or
enriclnsseJiients, But its diminutive, the banc

I They were called color^ftes-catuielabres.

76 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

with no dossier^ was very much used to sit down
at table, and the banltt, or banc a coucher^ in
the shape of the archebanc^ serving as both
coffer and couch/ continued its good service,
especially in the antechambers, for footmen and
chambermaids ; the bed clothes quite naturally
found their place during the day in the long
coffer that served as a seat.

The chaire, which unde r Francois I preserved
itSTnassive build, began m the next reign to grow
somewhat lighter. The dossier, completely
straight, is still always very high, about six feet,
and would be exceedingly uncomfortable, with
its carving in high relief, if drapings, and
especially flat movable cushions,^ which every
sitter could dispose of to his own mind, did not
give a certain softness. As many as four cushions
were placed on a chair e ; one to sit on, one for
the small of the back,^ two astride the arms ; and
in this way, but for the tombstone rectitude of
the back, one would not really have been badly
seated. On the front, a step, the estrier^ was
often part of the structure of the chair e.
Sometimes the back was movable ; by the help
of pivots or hinges it could be lowered forward,
and supported on the arms could turn into a
bed-side table, uncovering too a little cupboard
hollowed out of the wall.

1 Fig. 12.

2 Called cancaii.x.

3 It was almost impossible to lean the shoulders back, because
of the ruff or the enormous collar-.

CHAIRS 77

It was in the accotoirs or side-pieces that the
great monumental thing first became lightened.
From full walls they became an open frame with
a row of balusters ^ ; the arms, freed in this way,
were curved, became supple, terminated in a
volute or the head of a ram or a lion, and soon |
people spoke of a " chatre a bras^ Next, it was \
the seat that ceased to be a coffer, through the Aj
disappearance pf its front wall, then of the other ^
three ; the back became lower, and at last was
pierced, and side by side with the great ckaire
of traditional architecture, seat of honour and of
state, which down to the end of the reign of
Henri IV continued to mount guard in its un-
changing place by the bed, under the name of
chair e de salle^ there were to be found in the
hall and in the chamber several chaires dc bras
capable of being moved about as wanted for
conversation or various occupations, which could
be grouped near a window, or before the fire,
around a gaming table or about the bed for the
** caquets de V accoiichee " (gossip with the lady
in bed). These were called chaires h femmes^
for the men of the sixteenth century were rude
creatures, and had, except they were Henri the
Thirds or Saint- Megrins, practically no care for
comfort ; the escabeaii was completely sufficient
for them.

Of these chaires or chaises ^ so lightened,

I Fig. 21.

2,Called indiscriminately, under Henri III, cliayin\ chairc, or
chaise.

78 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

some were made square in plan,^ and their legs,
simple uprights square in section with chamfered
arrises,* or slender columns with slight entasis
and a moulding suggesting base and capital,^ are
joined at the bottom by means of substantial
cross-pieces generally put together in the shape
, of a rectangular frame,'* sometimes H-shaped,^
which gives the chair a much more informal
aspect. It was long before joiners emancipated
their chairs from these low cross-ties. For they
always had in mind frequent flittings with all
their attendant risks ; and furthermore, as long
as the earthenware tiles and stone pavements
with all their unevennesses had not been replaced
by wooden floors, the legs of the chairs were
bound to be continually knocking against these
rough points, which would speedily have dis-
located them but for these strong reinforcements.
The back, if not absolutely upright, was barely
sloped at all in the oldest types ; it was full, and
its panel was most commonly carved with a
medaille ^ ; it was then reduced to a frame and
the space occupied by turned balusters,^ a carved
vertical splat, sometimes of the outline of a flat
baluster,^ or, as we shall presently find it, by a
stuffed garniture. The arms had, from the

1 Figs. 22, 26, 27, 28.

2 Fig. 23.

3 Figs. 22, 24, 26, 28.

4 Figs 22, 27, 28.

5 Figs. 23 and 26.

6 Figs. 22 and 23.

7 Fig. 25.

8 Fig. 27.

THE "CAQUETOIRE" 79

h

very beginning, a sinuous line, more or less
accentuated, and terminated in a volute some-
times complete,^ sometimes hinted,^ which is both
the most graceful shape possible and the one
best adapted to the human arm that is to rest
on it. These arms were upborne by prolongations
of the front legs, baluster turned ^ or already
carved into the similitude of reversed consoles, (|
as they were to be for the next two centuries.'*

Other chairs with arms are trapeze-shaped, the
back being much narrower than the front and
the arms curved ; others were constructed on a
polygonal ground plan — something like an
octagon cut in two — with four or six legs ^ and
elbowed arms ; this last model, it must be
admitted, is very ugly. Besides, another defect
common to nearly all these chairs is that their
limbs are frail and slender as the legs of insects.
We may, last of all, mention chaises h bras
tournantes^ mounted on a pivot supported by a
tripod.

Two varieties of chair with regard to which
historians of French furniture can hardly agree
are the caquetoire and the chaise di vertiigadin.

One thing certain is that the picturesque name
of caquetoire was given to a light chair, easy to
move for the convenience of conversation ; in
other words, to the chaise a femme. Speaking

1 Figs. 27 and 28.

2 Figs. 22 and 23.

3 Figs. 22 and 27.

4 Fig. 28. -:

S^Figs. 24 and 25.

8o LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

of the women of his own time, the humanist
Henri Estienne says, in his Apologie pour
Herodote^ printed in 1566: ^'It nowise appears
that they have their mouths frozen, at any rate
I will answer for it on behalf of the ladies of
Paris, who could not refrain from calling their
chairs caquetoiresy But of what shape were
they ? Certain students (Bonnaffe, Molinier)
say, following the dictionaries : it was a low-
seated chair, with high back and no arms.
But it was in the Dictionnaire de Trevoux that
they found this definition, and this belongs to
the early eighteenth century ; the date is rather
a late one for the validity of the authority. A
quarter of a century earlier Furetiere had written :
" a low, convenient chair, that serves for sitting
by the fire " ; he did not say that it was a chair
without arms. Other writers, like Havard and
Champeaux, relying on the inventories, think
that it was merely the smallest and lightest
variety of the chaise a bras ; and the texts
seem to justify them. In a period when it was
a rare exception for a chair to be without arms,
and the circumstance never was omitted from a
description, we find commonly written: '' une
petite chaire hasse^ autrement dicte caque-
toire,^^ . . . Elsewhere: ''six petites chayres^
autrement dit caquetoyresJ^ And again: " trois
aultres chaises caquetoirs^ semhlahles aux
trois chaises cy-dessus " ; now these last-men-
tioned are " h hras^ toutes garnyes de velourz
noir^ . . . But, it will be said, the chairs that

FARTHINGALE CHAIRS 8i

are known to-day as caquetotres^ in the language
of amateurs of old furniture, are not low chairs,
but the contrary. The difficulty is perhaps only
an apparent one; might not a low chair {chaise
basse) mean a low-backed chair ? One of
Havard's passages seems to indicate this: "six
large caqiietoires^ with one arm-chair a haut
dossier y In fact, we know of no armless chairs,
with low seat and high back, dating from the
sixteenth century; while chairs with arms, low
back and high seat, are not very uncommon.

And the chaises a verhigadin — farthingale
chairs ? The same controversies arise over them.
The verUigadin or vertiigade (the word is
Spanish like the thing itself) was the arrangement
of hoops that lined women's skirts, that incredible
amplitude and cylindrical shape out of which
emerged the inverted cone of the bust, a fashion
that lasted in France during the reigns of Henri
III and Henri IV, and in Spain much longer.
Certain writers believe that the chaise a vertu-
gadin was distinguished by a kind of pad that
made the back more comfortable ; others have
ingeniously said that as these voluminous petti-
coats prevented women from sitting down on a
chair with arms, the chaise a vertugadin was
nothing else than the chair without arms,
invented expressly on the appearance of that
very ugly fashion. Havard, who is of this
opinion, seems to have brought together in his
dictionary texts that completely prove it : " Three
chairs with arms and back, two forms and

82 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

two chaises a vertugadin, , . . Nine chairs of
gilded walnut, five a vertugadin and four with
arms. . . . Six chaises a vertugadin of painted
wood, covered with coarse stitch tapestry, and
three chairs with arms," etc., etc. Later, when
the word fauteuil takes the place of the ex-
pression chaise a bras, it is the fauteuil that is
quoted in contradistinction to the chaise a
vertugadin : *' six chaises a vertugadin and
tvfo fauteuils, covered in tapestry." ^
^i4'UM/(^ I^ t^^ sixteenth century the fauteuil is not
yet the same thing as the chaise a bras ; as in
the Middle Ages, it is a seat of state, a '' chere
brisee^'' or folding chair, either in reality or in
seeming, but always made a tenailles, in other
words, X-shaped with curved limbs and low back.
A contemporary writer describes its structure
very accurately, when he says of a man wi'^h
hands joined that he has " his fingers interlaced
one within the other in the manner of a chair e
briseeP

Lastly comes the commonalty of seats with
neither back nor arms : escabeau and escabelle^
forme ^ placet, basset, selle, bancelle and
tabouret, . . . They resemble one another and
are very often confounded ; they hardly undergo
any modification from one century to the next.
Square, rectangular, round, even triangular,
standing on legs or solid boards, they abound
everywhere ; no other seats are known for sitting
down at a table ; in ordinary circumstances only
I Inventory dated 1652.

CUSHIONS 83

women have seats with backs . . . and yet !
Look at the two little pictures of the time of
Henri III in the Louvre, both representing a
ball at court. The king, the queen and Catherine
de Medici are in faiidesteiiils, but there are
great ladies, in the most sumptuous toilette,
sitting plump and plain on wooden escabeaux^
to which a minimum of comfort has been added
by means of cushions. The race is very hardy
and has a strong backbone.

However, as the seventeenth century draws

near, we find the number of sieges garnis

increasing. The Middle Ages, as we have said,

were by no means ignorant of them, but they

remained very rare down to the period of

Charles IX and Henri III ; and people were

satisfied with movable garnitures, cushions and

tapestry. The tabouret alone was regularly

provided with a stuff, a tapestry, a piece of

leather nailed on and covering a layer of hair,

flock, or even feathers. The chaise a bras and

the chaise h vertugadin ^ might have their

seat and their back also fitted in this way.

Certain seats were garnis with leather and

converts with, stuff ; on the frame there was

stretched a strong piece of bull hide serving as a

support (like webbing or straps also) for the

stuffing, which was covered with a stuff.

The woven fabrics for covering chairs were
matched with the garniment of the bed ; they
were velvets either plain or figured, damasks,
I Figs. 26, 28, and 29.

84 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

embellished or not with embroideries, appliques^
or enframings in gold or silver cloth, or reseuil,
which was lace, also of gold or silver, silk fringes
with trimmings of precious metal ; there was
tapestry" in coarse or fine stitch, or Hungarian
stitch ; or quite simply red or yellow serge.
The leather, when it was visible, was crimson
morocco,^ or lemon-coloured, either plain or gilt
with the little bookbinder's stamps, or contre-
pointe, or yet again it was cuir de boeuf
ecorche, in this case simply stretched, by means
of gilt or silvered nails, over the frame of the seat
and the back, without any other garniture.

Chairs with garnished arms, of the kind shown
in Figs. 29 and 30 — characterised by the broad
flat arms, with scroll ends, the uprights of the
back terminated by a reversed console ornament
with acanthus leaf, and by the very ornate
cross-piece that joins the front legs, and also,
sometimes, the back legs — date from the reign of
Henri IV ; some were made in France, but the
majority were imported, and the style is de-
finitely Hispano-Flemish.

Other chaises a bras, rudimentary in structure,
were '^ toutes garnies,^^ with a nailed-down
velvet covering all over, to the very legs.^ This
fashion was to have a long vogue, since if we are
to put faith in Le Brun's tapestry, Louis XIV
and the Infanta Marie Therese, at the ceremony

1 Then called cuir de Levant or cuir de Turquie.

2 See in the Louvre the small full-length portraits of Charles
X and Louis de Balzac d'Entragues.

CARREAUX 85

of their marriage in 1660, had for seats chaises
a bras with low backs, coarsely made with round
sticks of wood and full-covered with azure velvet
sprinkled v^dth gold fleur-de-lys.

Let us add that the inventories teach us (for
none of these common chairs has survived), that
in the south of France, and presently in Paris,
from around 1580, chairs had begun to be done
with straw.

But perhaps the most frequently used of all
seats were the carreaux^ or flat squab cushions,
everywhere found in great numbers, which were
equipped with a big silk tassel by which they
could be carried, and which were placed on
chaises a bras, escabeaiix and placets, when
there were any, or on the corner of a coffer or
quite simply on the ground. Middle- class folk
were content to have them stuffed with straw.
At court *' the custom was to sit only on the
ground when the Queen was present." The
inventory of Catherine de Medici shows no less
than 381 carreaux (only the covers, of course)
in one single coffer, some of tapestry stitch,
others of gold and silver embroidery on silk,
or cloth of gold. Many of them had been
embroidered with her own royal hands : **she
spent her time, after dinner,'' Brantome tells us,
" in dihgently toiUng at her silk work, in which
she was as perfect as could be possible."

PART THREE
THE LOUIS XIII STYLE

CHAPTER ONE: HISTORY
AND CHARACTERISTICS
OF THE STYLE.

Sometimes we hear of a so-called " Henri IV
style." In reality it is over-subtle to try to
distinguish two distinct and successive styles in
the period stretching from 1594 (the beginning
of the effective reign of the Bearnais king) to
1660 (the start of Louis the Fourteenth's
personal government). In this long and rather
confused epoch — let us say, for the sake of
simplicity, in the first half of the seventeenth
century — something decays and dies, the art of
the Renaissance, and something begins to establish
itself, v^hich vdll be the Louis XIV art ; both
coherent and easy to define ; betv^een them
interposes an art that has a claim to recognition,
and v^hich may v^ell be called Louis XIII, but
which lacks a clearly defined physiognomy,
because it is full of contradictions, and, taking it
on the whole and with certain exceptions, does
not possess a frankly national character.

It was, as has been often said, one of those
moments of French civilisation when France
received more than she gave. The Italian in-
fluence and the Hispano-Flemish influence cross,
supplant or overlie one another. The reign of
Louis XIII comes between two regencies : his

89

90 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

mother was a Florentine, and had sought to
impose a Concini on France ; and yet, when she
wanted a palace, it was the good Frenchman
Salomon de Brosses who had built her the
Luxembourg, and to decorate its galleries she
had chosen Rubens, while, they say, Richelieu
advised her rather to have Josepin the Roman.
She continued to pay a pension to the Flemings,
Pourbus and Bril, as Henri IV had done. Anne
of Austria was a Spaniard ; when Regent she had
as her first minister, favourite, and even more,
Giulio Mazarini, a passionate lover of art, who
would fain see nothing around him but work that
was Italian, either by origin or in style. When
she is to have her new apartments in the Louvre
decorated, she will turn to the insipid Romanelli.
An all-powerful Louis XIV with a Colbert beside
him were needed, so that national art might
receive the encouragement of the State to the
exclusion of rivals.

The greatest artists of the time, in painting at
least, were they really French ? Poussin himself,
a native of Andelys, in Normandy, with his mind
after Descartes and his soul after Corneille,
Poussin makes Rome his real fatherland ; he lives
there for forty years, and dies there after
becoming more than half Italian. Claude Gellee,
born in Lorraine before it became a French
province, always lived in Rome, never went to
Paris, never looked on himself as a subject of the
king of France, any more than did his com-
patriot Jacques Callot. Philippe de Champaigne,

THE FRENCH SCHOOL 91

a native of Brussels, whose portraits of Jansenists
are so French in their " intellectuality " and by
the shade of Christianity they express, spends all
his life at Paris, but preserves more than one
characteristic of his race. Others, the ready
decorators, fluent and empty, the La Hires, the
Vouets, the Perriers, represent that art, as inter-
national as Jesuit architecture and living on a
fund of Italian common- places, which is
practically identical with itself from Spain. to the
Low Countries and from Paris to Boulogne. As
for the pale Le Sueur, that painter so prodigiously
overrated that the simple-minded dictionaries of
sixty years ago still referred to him as the
" French Raphael," he never was in Italy at all;
it seems that the substance of his art was almost
all borrowed from the engravings of Marc
Antonio, the Marco Dentes, the Agostino Vene-
zianos, and, in spite of the dainty grace of his
celebrated Muses, he is decidedly too weak for it
to be possible to declare that he represents the
true French school. Alone in their modest
corner, not altogether despised, since they were
all three members of the Academic de peinture
in its earliest days, but without influence and
relegated to a category of painting regarded as
inferior, the mysterious brothers Le Nain,
with their scenes of peasant life, awkward,
without brilliance, and so movingly true, are
French of the purest metal with no trace of
alloy.

The art of the carver and sculptor is more

92 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

national in quality. The Italian gran gusto
doubtless is rampant in it, especially in the
decoration of churches and palaces ; but for one
Francheville, a Fleming disguised as F^^ancavilla^
how many honest artists there were, touched
with something of clumsiness, but also, in default
of genius, endowed with a probity and respect
for life that compel our esteem, men like Simon
Guillain, like Warin and the anonymous authors
of so many memorial statues that are life-like
and convincing.

Architecture, which will presently bring us
to furniture, is highly prosperous and very mixed
in character. After the critical wars of religion,
great fortunes were built up or restored, the
need for ease and comfort increased, and at the
same time a feeling of greater security and
stability. On the other hand, a marked renewal
of Catholic piety was clearly manifested. The
result was the construction of a great number of
mansions in Paris and the towns throughout the
kingdom, chateaux in all the provinces, convents
and churches everywhere.

Churches keep departing more and more, in
their actual structure, no longer merely in
decoration, from the pure gothic tradition.
Saint Peter's at Rome and the Gesu were the
models imitated throughout the whole of
Christendom ; the architecture known as Jesuit^
Italian in origin, is as cosmopolitan as the order
that gave it its name. A few churches, like
Sainte-Marie of Nevers with its inconceivably

FLOURISHING ARCHITECTURE 93

complicated facade, even copied the Hispano-
Flemish rendering of the trans-Alpine style.

To set off against this, in the domain of lay
architecture — not that of the royal palaces, but
that of the hotels and the chateaux of the
nobles, the members of the parliament and the
financiers — the resistance to the Italian invasion
remained strong and effective ; French good
sense protested against the passive adoption of
building methods appropriate to another climate
and different habits. There wsls a great deal of
building for private persons in the Paris of
Henri IV, of Marie de Medici, of Louis XIII
and Anne of Austria ; the Place Royale drew up
its line of tricoloured hotels — slate, stone and
brick, with their high-pitched roofs ; quantities
of new homes rejuvenated the Marais ; the
whole of the He Saint-Louis, the old He Notre-
Dame, saw its bald meadows transformed into
streets and quarters with ^' /ogts de qualite^^
such as the hotels Chenizot, Lambert de
Thorigny, Lauzun ; there were whole new
parishes to the north of the Tuileries, and west
of Saint-Germain-des-Pres. . . . This first half
of the seventeenth century was a period of
extraordinary activity for architects, and
Corneille can write almost without the least
hyperbole : —

Toiite une ville entilre avec pompe b&tte
Semble d^un vteuxfossi par miracle sortie.

This private architecture had the great merit

I

94 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

of forming itself without deliberate preconception
or pedantry on the needs and the tastes of a
clientele that were perfectly aware of what they
wanted, and imposed that on the artists they
employed, however it might be at the expense
of Vignole and Palladio.^

Now these people, although serious, pious and
genuinely severe in manners taken as a whole,
had a continually increasing taste for social life
and intercourse. They were still rude, and
physically hardened by war, the chase, and the
rural life they led during a considerable part of
the year. And so they were not very exacting
with regard to comfort ; in a hotel of this period
the part intended for private personal life was
sacrificed; everything was for ''receiving,"
entertaining. It has often been said that the
differentiation of special rooms (salon, dining hall,
bedchamber, study, etc.) had not come into
existence till the beginning of the eighteenth
century. This is true on the whole ; but nearly
a hundred years earlier certain very complete
houses of refined appointments, such as the town

I It is perhaps superfluous to say that the anecdote, so often
repeated unchallenged since Tallemant des Reaux told it first,
of the Marquise de Rambouillet turning architect herself and
one fine evening, by sudden inspiration {Quick, faper ! I have
found out the way io do what I wanted!) a new method of
arranging suites of rooms, is nothing but legend. A legend too
is the great novelty of her famous blue room ; one has only to
read a few inventories of the period to know that there were
rooms hung with blue long before that of the incomparable
Arthenice. One has to be a school pedant to believe in this
dominating importance, in the domain of social life and manners,
of the people talked about in the manuals of literary history.

THE HOTEL TUBEUF 95

house of president Tubeuf, already contained a
winter dining-room and a summer dining-
room.

Sauval gives us, in the Antiquites de la ville
de Paris, a detailed description of this fine H6tel
Tubeuf, which was a completely typical example
of the town house. It was built on the plan
then in fashion ; a main building between the
court and the garden, with two wings to right
and left of the court, reaching to the street.
The president's suite, on the ground floor, was
sufficiently modest : it included a hall, a study,
a chamber with an alcove and a small chamber ;
then, still on the ground floor, there were the
two dining-rooms we have just mentioned, the
kitchen, the offices and other common apart-
ments. On the " bel etage,^'' after ascending an
immense staircase, you came to the far more
spacious suite of Mme. la presidente : a ^* grande
salle ^ with arched wooden roof, a state chamber
with an alcove and a gallery, occupying all of
one wing " ; the galerie was indispensable for all
who prided themselves on '^ proprete,''^ as it was
then called, that is to say, elegance. This was
the entertaining suite. A second suite, much
smaller and intimate, " so convenient," Sauval
says, " that it is much more often occupied than
the other, as being not so vast and more retired,
while the first one seems only made for luxury
and receiving," was composed of a vestibule, a

I The word salon, borrowed from the Italian, was not to come
into ordinary use until the last quarter of the century.

96 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

chamber, a cabinet and a clothes-closet ; it was
served by a small private staircase.

The state suite was arranged '^ en enfilade^'*
the doors, far larger than in the sixteenth century,
opening with double leaves one over against the
other, the windows, enormous, without mullions,
allowed abundant light to enter through square
glass panes of large size and almost perfectly-
transparent. The ceilings, arched and sub-
divided into compartments, were ornamented
with paintings and high reliefs of painted and
gilded stucco ; the walls were stretched with
goffered leather, gilt and silvered, Flemish
tapestries, and silk stuffs, or they were covered
with painted wainscoting and gilt in panels made
with large high mouldings ; the fireplaces, always
monumental, made of stone and marble in the
large rooms, often of wood in small rooms, as a
rule had their overmantel adorned by a painting.*
All this decoration was rich and pompous, heavy
in its details ; sometimes quite the contrary, of
the most sober severity; the fine and almost
winged grace of the Renaissance was far away now.

That, in its main lines, is the frame within
which we must imagine the furniture of the
Louis XIII style. A room thus decorated, even
if unfurnished, never seemed void ; by way of
furniture nothing was put into it beyond what
was necessary, and that was very little.

Let us take up our period from its earliest
days. The entry of Henri IV into Paris after
I Most frequently a portrait.

HENRI IV AS PATRON 97

his abjuration, and then the Edict of Nantes, put
an end to the wars of religion, the '^ frenzies " of
the Ligue, and the Spanish peril, which had
dispersed and disorganised everything, threatened
the very existence of France and thrown all the
arts into a kind of stuporous sleep. The great
reconstructor that the first of the Bourbons was
in every department was most careful — though
personally he was apparently without any taste
in such matters — not to neglect these trivialities,
as Sully called them grumblingly ; *' /adre vert "
as he was, if we are to believe d'Aubigne, a
"stingy fellow,'' he understood the value of
sumptuary spendings and helped artists with his
pennies at the same time as he encouraged to the
best of his ability the industries of art.

In 1608, by letters patent, which inflicted a
serious blow upon the privileges of the guilds —
whether for greater good or for harm to the in-
dustries of art this is not the place to discuss —
he granted certain privileged artists and crafts-
men lodgings in the great gallery of the Louvre,
by which means they escaped from ordinary
jurisdiction, and consequently from the regu-
lations of their trade guild. They had power to
train apprentices, who became masters in their
turn, " both in Paris and in the other towns of
the realm, without being called upon to execute
any masterpiece, to take letters, to present them-
selves for mastership, to invite, when passed, the
masters of the said towns, or give a feast for
them or anything else whatever." There in the

V

98 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

Louvre, on the ground floor of the gallery
along the river, there were mathematicians,
damaskeners, tapestry makers, embroiderers,
painters, sculptors, and joiners also ; thus in the
first list, that of 1608, there figures Laurent
Stabre, *' joiner and carpenter in ebony, maker of
cabinets to the King."

This title is in itself of a w^hole revolution in
luxury carpentering in France. We have in-
dicated the increasingly marked taste at the end
of the sixteenth century for furniture in v^hich
the sober effects of reliefs broadly or delicately
cut in solid walnut were replaced by the more
showy and easier effects of a polychromy obtained
by the juxtaposition of different materials. It
was a foreign trick, ''German fashion," or
"Genoa fashion," or "Spanish fashion." At
the beginning of the new century it is all over ;
all luxurious joiner's work, or nearly all, is
ehenisterie ; the glorious and characteristically
French tradition of the carvers in oak and walnut
is in danger of dying out. Moderate furniture,
if the phrase may be permitted, that belonging
to the plain middle classes or to that part (the
very great majority) of the nobility which
cannot follow the fashions of the " great," still
continues indeed to be made of massive home-
grovni wood ; but when it is carved it is in a
common-place fashion, with neither invention nor
character ; the joiners confine themselves to
clumsily copying Renaissance motives that had
become mere stock common-places.

EBONY 99

Ebony was the triumphant material before the
importation in large quantities of coloured woods
from the two Americas. Hard and capable of
a perfect polish, it is brittle and very prone to
splitting and chapping ; it could not be used in
large masses, and the supports of the seventeenth
century cabinets are generally made of blackened
pearwood. The technique of this funereal wood,
as practised under Henri IV and Louis XHI, is
half-way between that of solid wood and that of
veneering. Upon a substructure of common
wood, of vulgar deal even, were glued sheets of
ebony of sufficient thickness — about eight
millimetres — to allow of carving in very shallow
bas-relief. These sheets formed compartments
geometrically framed with those delicate wavy
mouldings, invented, they say, by the German
Hans Schwanhard, which had such a great vogue
in the Low Countries. ^ Those surfaces which
were not carved were often engraved with
incised rincemix and flowers. As for the carvings,
which were very flat, they were scenes of
mythology or religious subjects, so complicated
and of such heavy exuberance that they betray
their Flemish origin, or the imitation, made in
France, of Flemish models. This technique
excludes aD curving surfaces ; and thus furniture
made in this way — cabinets, and sometimes

I On this subject we might remark that most of the paintings
of the Dutch school were meant to be framed in ebony with
waved mouldings, not in gilt wood carved in high relief; the
way they have been framed for the last two centuries is a pure
misconception.

loo LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

cupboards in two sections — necessarily are of a
simple, square, massive structure. In spite
of the gloomy aspect and uniformity of the
material, these all-ebony cabinets are very
sumptuously splendid. But the shimmer of the
black polished surfaces too often kills the
modelling; in this respect ebony is by far
inferior to walnut.

On other cabinets ivory was wedded to ebony,
or else bone; these were ''German" cabinets,
which does not mean that they were all made
beyond the Rhine ; they were made also at
Antwerp and in France itself, but it is a difficult
matter to attribute with any certainty their
proper origin to those that have survived, unless
it is disclosed by an inscription, by a coat of
arms, or by the dress of the persons represented
in the decoration.

France continued also to import from Flanders
and from Spain (but in this case the Spanish and
the Flemish styles intermingle so as to be com-
pletely indistinguishable, which is not at all
astonishing) those chaises a bras and a vertti-
gadin fitted with leather fastened on to the
wood with big decorative gilt or silvered nails,
which we saw make their appearance under
Henri III ; these also were copied among us, and,
just as for the cabinets, it is difficult to establish
the actual place where they were made.
Generally speaking, howeve\ .^hen they are
*' a piliers tors^'' with legs and uprights turned
to a spiral, the spiral more drawn out and a

MARQUETRY loi

softer profile in the turning indicate a Hispano- |
Flemish origin.

Thirty or forty years after the first in-
stallation of artists in the galleries of the Louvre,
this slightly humiliating subjection of the French
furniture industry to that of the Low Countries
still endures, for a certain Jean Mace or Masse,
joiner in ebony and a native of Blois, receives his
lodging- v^rarr ant in 1664 " on account of his long
experience in that art acquired in the Low
Countries and the proofs he hath given thereof
by the examples of cabinet-making in ebony and
other woods of divers colours which he presented
to the Queen Regent." Note by the way these
" woods of divers colours " ; we have come to the
moment when Holland and Flanders are pro-
ducing and exporting large quantities of those
cupboards, bureaux, and tables (cabinets of this
species are uncommon) on which flourish very
full and overladen motives of flowers represented
"to the life," in marquetry of wood inlaid on
an ebony ground. In the interval there had
worked for the king, as tnenuisiers-ebeniers^ a
Van Opstal, an Ostermayer, an Equeman, whose
names tell their origin sufficiently clearly.

As for Italy (although the second wife of Henri
IV, the regent during the minority of Louis XIII,
was an Italian), the productions of that country
had less vogue than those of the Low Countries,
and it is incontestable that the whole of French

I The word cbcnistc was not to be accepted finally until the
end of the seventeenth century.

\

102 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

decorative art is much more Flemish than ItaHan
down to about 1645. At the same time, alongside
cabinets of Flemish origin or in the Flemish style,
the inventories do not fail fairly frequently to
note others that are "of lapis and agate," in
other words, imported from Florence, or ^^ filetes
d^ argent a la mode d' Italie " ; but they are
the exception. Similarly, beginning from the
moment when the influence of Mazarin in such
things was established over Richelieu — who had,
it is said, entrusted him with his purchases of
works of art of every kind — and then over Anne
of Austria and thence over the whole court, there
was no sudden change in the fashion, but the
ratio between Flemish and Italian furniture was
gradually reversed.

We have very little knowledge of the artistic
riches brought together by Richelieu in his
Palais-Cardinal — the Palais-Royal of to-day —
and in his immense Chateau de Richelieu ; they
were doubtless very similar to those which, a few
years later, Mazarin was to accumulate with all the
passion of a collector. The inventory of Mazarin's
furniture and possessions has been preserved ; it is
a prodigious accumulation, overwhelming almost,
of furniture, goldsmith's work, jewels and price-
less fabrics. It will never be surpassed in magnifi-
cence except by the furniture of the Crown under
Louis XIV; and the latter will surpass it infi-
nitely in artistic value, for it seems that Mazarin
loved above everything richness of material and
a luxury that was more showy than refined.

MAZARIN'S COLLECTIONS 103

He possessed more than twenty cabinets with
niches, statuettes, busts, balustrades, pilasters,
pillars, terminals, bas-reliefs, on which were
brought together every imaginable kind of
precious material, from gilt brass to mother-of-
pearl, from cornelian to lapis lazuli, from ebony
to tortoiseshell, from ivory to silver, from
tableaux de inignature to mosaics of precious
stones. Here is a description of one : " A cabinet
of ebony, of the Ionic order, adorned with six
pilasters of lapis with fillets and capitals of gilt
brass, in the base of which there are three
pictures in miniature representing three parts of
the world. In the first stage there are two niches
with two figures of gilt brass, one representing
Force and the other Temperance, and in the
middle a picture in miniature in which is
depicted Rome triumphant ; the upper stage is
composed of three pictures similarly in miniature
representing three Roman legends, the said stage
being ornamented with two satyrs in gilt brass,
carrying on their heads baskets of fruit, and
serving as pilasters. The pediment, adorned with
two large cartouches and cornice of ebony with
lapis lazuli inlay, between which is painted a
miniature dial, in the middle of which is a Venus
holding a heart in her right hand, and before
her is a Cupid. The whole outlined in gilt
brass, and all the said pictures surrounded with
a small festoon also of gilt brass." Ebony, lapis,
and gilt brass ; that must have made a harmony,
or rather a dissonance of unparalleled crudeness.

104 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

Another of Mazarin's cabinets was decorated
with niches containing ebony vases holding silver
bouquets, and by lapis pillars with silver bases
and capitals ; the doors and the fronts of the
innumerable drawers we.^^ covered with cor-
nelians, agates, jaspers set in silver ; elsewhere
silver inlay outlined cartouches and rinceaux.
Another had its facade overladen with garlands,
fruits, flowers, pots a bouquets , pictures of
flowers and birds, all inlaid with stone, lapis,
cornelian, chalcedony, jasper and yellow marble.

Among these bedizened monuments some
most certainly came from the workshops of
Tuscany ; others had been executed in Paris by
Italian lapidaries suborned at immense cost by
the minister, whom Louis XIV was later to take
into his own service, and whose names have been
preserved ; these were the brothers Ferdinando
and Orazio MigHorini, Luigi Giacetti, Branchi
and others. The carving and chasing were
carried out by Domenico Cucci and Filippo
Caffieri, the founder of the illustrious dynasty
that was to become so completely French.

Nearly all the stipi of this period — to give
them their Italian name — ^were destroyed after
the end of the seventeenth century, so contrary
were they to French taste ; there is one, how-
ever, in the Cluny Museum which will give an
idea of the kind of thing they were. It is
shapeless and of extraordinary ugliness.

Many also, in the Mazarin collection, were the
tables of stone mosaic or pierres de Florence^

PIERRE GOLLE 105

real mineralogical pictures on a black ground of
touch. Upon one, shields with ciphers ; on
another, " trophies of Turkish weapons " ; a third
was over-flourished largely with flowery rmceaux ;
on it there might be seen '' an oval, from all
four sides of which spring bouquets of divers
kinds of flowers, foliage and fruits, with sundry
butterflies and birds on the branches, filling the
ground of the said table, and in the midst of the
said oval a basket of flowers, all the said flowers,
fruits, foliage, branches, birds, oval and basket
being of divers stone inlay, to wit, cornelian,
chalcedony and lapis."

The frieze and legs of these tables began to
be generally made of gilt wood, in spite of the
formal prohibition of this issued from time to
time by the king ; we know that the usual and
characteristic fate of sumptuary laws is never to
be enforced.

Anne of Austria's favourite was in other
respects, in spite of his very natural taste for the
things of his own country, an eclectic ; he no
more scorned the furniture of the Low Countries
than his compatriots hesitated to have their
portraits painted by a Flemish artist. He had
enticed from Holland a cabinet-maker called
Pierre Golle, and from him he ordered cabinets
that were perhaps a little more sober, but still
quite sufficiently garish ; one was of ebony
^'profile aetain^^^ which means that the surfaces
were divided into compartments outlined with
inlaid tin filleting; it displayed the inevitable

io6 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

niches flanked by small marble pillars with
capitals of gilt bronze and inhabited by alle-
gorical statuettes ; the support was composed
of twelve gilt terminals displaying the signs of
the zodiac. Another was ornamented with
" squares, lozenges, triangles and ovals of tortoise-
shell " outlined in waved mouldings. Here we
see the principal elements — tortoiseshell, tin and
gilt bronzes on an ebony ground — of the art
with which the name of Andre Boulle has become
inseparably joined, but which was not invented
by Boulle.

To finish with the Mazarin furniture, which is
of the highest historical importance, let us take
at random the description of a bed. These are
only stuffs now, the wooden parts are completely
clad over, the curtains, cantonnieres* pentes*
and soubassements ^ are crimson velvet em-
broidered with silver flowers, alternating in
stripes with silver cloth embroidered with gold
flowers, the whole lined with crimson taffeta and
edged with a gold and silver fringe ; sheaths of
cloth of silver surround the bed posts, which
terminate at the top with vases covered with
crimson taffeta and each containing a bouquet of
solid silver flowers.

This furniture is unique in its own day for
richness, but it is not exceptional in style.
Fouquet's furniture (and he could almost rival
Mazarin in taste for splendour as in the squander-
ing of public wealth) is completely similar, though
the Surintendant des Finances seems to have been

TRANSITION 107

rather more refined in taste than the minister ;
and many other inventories are available to prove
that all the most super-luxurious and costly
furniture, down to 1660 or 1670, had the same
characteristics.

What was there really French in all this ?
Nothing, or hardly anything. The wholesome
and honest tradition of France, which would
fain have the beauty of a piece of furniture, like
that of a building, depend first and foremost on
the frank expression of the use it was meant
for, on the method of construction and the
qualities of the material, that tradition is broken.
The part of the Louis XIV period is gradually
to restore it.

But it was in princely furniture that the
tradition was lost. It was happily diflferent with
less costly pieces.

The chronology relating to those of the latter
that can be called Louis XIII in style is almost
impossible to ascertain. Let us say simply that
the oldest may have been made under Henri IV ;
as for the most recent, in certain regions they
come down at latest to the end of the eighteenth
century. One of the most constant and best
known characteristics of this style is the use of
turning, and especially of spiral turning. Now,
if beds and tables " ci piliers tors " had been
made from the end of the sixteenth century,
on the other hand, at Paris to the end of the
seventeenth, and still later in the provinces,
nearly all the seats and the tables in ordinary

io8 LOUIS Xlli FURNITURE

sets of furniture still had their legs turned in
this fashion, and a goodly number among the
royal furniture itself. Let us take two examples,
the first that come to hand. The billiard table
of Louis XIV, about 1700,^ had baluster legs,
joined by spiral cross pieces ; the portrait by
Ferdinand Elle^ of Mme. de Maintenon with
her youthful niece Frangoise d'Aubigne shows
us the foundress of Saint-Cyr sitting, about the
same date, in a large gilt arm-chair, "very
Louis XIV " in its back and arms, but with
spiral turned legs.

Carving on furniture is in a style that is no
other than that of the Renaissance in its decline,
but overloaded and so to say vulgarized ; it has
something heavy, borrowed, unoriginal, that
makes us regret the light grace, the delicacy in
the harmonies, the Attic rightness of the
proportions, and also the fancy, that indescribable
touch of fineness, sprightliness and happy
invention and improvisation, that enchants us in
the best productions of the preceding age. This
style is akin to that of opulent Flanders, but
without falling into the flabby turgidness which
is unendurably found in the decorative parts of
the cartoons executed by Rubens' studio for
Phillip IV, now in the Louvre, the Iriumph of

1 See Trouvain's engraving.

2 At Veraailles. In her celebrated portrait by Mignard (in
the Louvre) Mme. de Maintenon is seated on a chair the back of
which, the only part visible, with its fringed velvet surrounding
the uprights, and its turned brass vases, is in the pure Louis XIII
style. Now the portrait was painted somewhere about 1690.

MOTIVES 109

Religion and the Prophet Elijah, The architect
Blondel seems to us to have given an excellent
definition of the Louis XIII decorative art when
he noted in Jean Le Paultre (who engraved his
plates of architecture and ornaments about the
middle of the seventeenth century) " that air of
heaviness ... in which we nevertheless remark
a masculine, firm and well sustained expression."
What are the principal motives ? The period
invented hardly any at all. Here is the plume,'
everywhere repeated ad nauseam^ and a whole
gamut of motives half-way between the plume
and the acanthus leaf ^ ; the acanthus leaf, which
is retailed, so to speak, by the fathom as a
running ornament,^ or shapes itself into consoles
modilHonSj^ the feet of pieces of furniture ^ ;
running rinceaux^\ entrelacs enclosing in their
loops rosettes or half rosettes, and employed as
running 7 motives or to decorate a rectangular
panel ^; the winged cherub's head^; the flower
vase, the she]l,^° the oval or miroir^^ the eagle's
talon clutching a ball, called pied aaiglon,^^

1 Figs. 36, 39, 41, 43-

2 Figs. 37 and 38.

3 Fig. 37.

4 Figs. 35—38, 41.

5 Fig. 34.

6 Fig. 35.

7 Fig. 74.

8 Fig. 36.

9 Figs. 34 and 36.

10 Fig. 36. Observe the interesting awkwardness with which
a rustic joiner has interpreted in his own way the Renaissance
motives on this cupboard in two sections from the Dordogne
valley.

11 Fig. 34.

12 Fig. 38.

no LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

eagle's foot, which serves as a foot to certain
cupboards. None of all these are novelties.
We may add the eagle with outspread wings, the
garland or festoon of flowers and fruits, at this
time compact, thick, and made up of vegetable
elements treated in a sufficiently realistic fashion ;
drapery arranged in festoons or swags ; crossed
palms ; gadroons, etc.

The great majority of Louis XIII furniture,
of the kind with which we are concerned, was
decorated not with carving but with turnery;
never was this method of working wood, which
is quick, easy, and highly effective with little
trouble, more in use. Not merely were the legs
and stretchers of tables ^ turned, the feet of
coffers and cabinets,^ and all parts of chairs,^ but
also corner columns, purely ornamental, for cup-
boards ^ ; similar columns, either entire ^ or split
down the middle,^ were glued on the central
upright,^ whether true or false, of large cup-
boards with two doors. The most rudimentary
form of turning was called en chapelet^ \ the
most frequent was spiral, sometimes plain,'' and
sometimes embellished with a fillet in the bottom
of the groove.^° A spiral cross-bar was often in-

1 Figs. 53—62.

2 Figs. 31, 32, 39.

3 Figs. 63—78.

4 Figs. 37, 38, 40, etc.

5 Fig. 51.

6 Fig. 50.

7 The partie dormantc.

8 Figs. 31, 62, 63, etc.

9 Figs. 37, 38, etc.
10 Figs. 40, 44, etc.

TURNERY III

terrupted in the middle by a certain length of
plain circular turning.^ The legs of many tables
from Burgundy are composed, in a rather curious
fashion, of two parts, one spiral and the other
singularly like the air-cooled radiator of a
Hotchkiss gun.^ Small cupboards of finished
workmanship may have twisted columns with
ends carved with a kind of tuft of leaves or a
tulip. ^ A more refined form of turnery, and one
that may be really a work of art, because the
outhnes are capable of infinite variety, according
to the fancy of the craftsman, is turning en
balnstre,^ It lasted longer than the piliers
tors^ and most of the tables in which it appears
are of the Louis XIV period; but the regal
balusters in the shape of a carafe which serve
as supports to the buffet or cabinet, reproduced
in Fig. 39, are highly characteristic of the
Louis XIII period.

The legs of tables and seats were turned out
of pieces of wood square in section, and this
square form was left intact in places where the
maximum strength was necessary, and so the
greatest possible amount of the material was to
be preserved, that is to say, at the joining points
(by tenon and mortise) of the frieze or the
cross-bars of the stretcher ; and as almost always
happens, out of this technical necessity there was
evolved a very happy shape.^ These prismatic

1 Figs. 53, 65.

2 Fig. 55.

3 Fig. 37

4 Figs. 32, 58, 59. etc.

112 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

parts are much pleasanter to the eye when the
turner was satisfied with chamfering off the angles
and left the faces plain than when he fancied he
must embellish them with a kind of rosace carved
into the wood.

Ornamental pieces were also made by turning,
such as those pommeSy vases, or toupics that
decorated either the middle of the longitudinal
cross-piece of an H -shaped stretcher, or the point
of intersection of the two bars of an X-shaped
stretcher * ; such again as the little square panels
with concentric mouldings that decorate the
doors of certain cupboards.^

Symmetry — and we know to what extent the
seventeenth century was enamoured of it —
demanded that pairs of twisted pillars flanking
the fagade of an armoire, and the legs of a table,
taken in pairs, should have their spirals turning
in opposite directions. This arrangement is
nevertheless rare, and is only found on pieces
of very refined workmanship.-* Almost always
the spirals turn from left to right, like a bind-
weed stem ; really a matter of the turner's
convenience.

Mouldings have very close kinship with turnery,
or rather the work of the lathe is merely a com-
bination of circular mouldings ; the play of light

1 Figs. 53, 69, etc.

2 Figs. 54, 59

3 This motive is common on Breton panelled furniture, much
less common elsewhere. It had been occasionally used ever
since the sixteenth century.

4 Figs. 37 and 38. See also the sofa, Fig. 75.

MOULDINGS 113

and shade is the same on a turned column as on
a moulded upright, and hence the perfect unity
of a cupboard on which these two elements of
woodworking are combined. Louis XIII and
Louis XIV moulding — for it is all one and the
same thing — is less fine, but more ample, more
strongly expressed and much more developed
than that of the Renaissance ; certain seventeenth
century pieces of furniture, and not the least
handsome, have only mouldings as their sole
decorations. It was then that cupboards were
crowned with those noble cornices, complicated,
overflowing, on which the horizontal lines were
multiplied to infinity, cornices matched below
with bases symmetrical with them and almost as
strongly projecting ; the light seems to stream
and pour over them with shimmering ripples
like a sheet of water over the steps of a garden
cascade in the French style. Other mouldings
in large numbers enframe the doors, the drawers ;
others strongly mark the general divisions of
the whole piece and the subdivisions of its
parts.^

It is not uncommon for the decoration of
somewhat narrow surfaces to be entrusted to
moulding designs hollowed in the wood, as, for
instance, to the right and the left of the doors
of the pretty cupboard in two parts seen in
Fig. 42. These vertical mouldings very happily
clothe the bareness of the neutral parts of the
facade, while redeeming the width of the drawers.
I See in particular Figs. 48 and 49-51.

^

114 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

Sometimes the drawers have their front entirely
covered with horizontal mouldings.^

But the following are the two most usual
ways in which the surfaces were embellished in
these pieces, which are the triumph of pure
joiner's work. Sometimes they were covered
almost all over with a very wide enframement
made up of bevels and mouldings, Hke the frames
of the mirrors of the period, which only leaves
plain, in the middle, a small projecting plateau,
rectangular ^ or with a quarter circle hollowed out
of the corners ^ ; sometimes the doors of cupboards,
their lateral faces, the fagades of table drawers,'*
are subdivided into several surfaces of geometrical
outline. In the simplest types, which are also
the oldest,^ each door of a cupboard is divided
up into four small panels by means of an upright
and a traverse crossing it, which enclose them;
otherwise it is a lozenge cut in the soHd wood
and accompanied by four small triangles. It is
this last combination, or that made up of tri-
angles grouped in fours, and separated by a St.
Andrew's cross, which is used to decorate the
sides of cupboards.

Suppose the bevels of one of these lozenges to
be indefinitely increased at the expense of the
projecting central table-ground. It will then
go through the intermediate stage displayed on

1 Figs. 39, 43, 54.

2 Figs. 35, 39, 44, upper section ; 48, the little panels to right
and left of the door.

3 Fig. 38.

4 Fig. 56.

5 Figs. 32 and 33.

DIAMOND POINT 115

each of its doors by the cupboard of Fig. 42 ;
then in the end the Httle central lozenge would
be reduced to a point, and we should have a
low pyramid with quadrangular base ; this is the
pointe de diamante or diamond point. In the
sixteenth century and the beginning of the
seventeenth, when brilliant-cutting was invented,
pointe naive was the phrase for a diamond
naturally crystallised in the shape of a regular
octahedron — two square-based pyramids set base
to base. There are also natural diamond crystals
whose shape is a pyramided CMht, that is to say, a
cube each face of which carries a low pyramid ;
this is precisely the " diamond-point " of our
cupboards properly so-called. Four small tri-
angular pyramids flank the lozenge pyramid ; the
whole is cut into a slab of thick wood.

There is the starting point. Soon this faceted
motive was diversified and complicated at the
same time. Here is a cupboard^ with four
guichets on which the lozenge is subdivided
into four triangles ; altogether the square panel
carries eight equal triangular pyramids, or twenty-
four facets turned in eight different directions,
thus having eight different light-values ; the
effect is exceedingly happy. Here again is
another whose facade perhaps goes wrong for lack
of simplicity. Two of the panels have triangular
pyramids ; but the slopes of these are concave,
which makes the play of Hght more delicate.

1 Figs. 45, 50, 51, in the lower part of the doors.

2 Fig. 43. The same motive, in thi^ instance elongated, is
found on the door of the cupboard in Fig. 47,

ii6 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

The square panel of the middle has in its centre
a tiniest square pyramid surrounded hy four L-
shaped motives, which are fairly frequent ; they
often enframe a narrow rectangular panel. We
also meet with a lozenge elongated vertically
and flanked by six triangles, the whole being
outlined by two St. Andrew's crosses . . . and
many other combinations as well.

One of the most usual and most agreeable is
a kind of star,^ on a square panel, made of eight
grooves marking off eight pyramids, four of which
have triangular bases ; the other four have an
irregular quadrilateral for base ^ ; all the apexes
are turned towards the centre, which is marked
by a round button. Here there are twenty-eight
facets and twelve different orientations. This
arrangement is called pointes de gateau; the
expression conveys a picture, and indeed the whole
effect is not altogether unlike a square tart cut
into eight sections. An additional refinement
was to replace the triangles by a species of arrow
heads ^ ; taken in fours they form a cross of the
order of the Saint-Esprit.

If the bevels of an elongated rectangular panel
are increased, they will come together and in that
case result in a solid mass known as a tas de
sable or sand heap. It is not an uncommon
motive among these faceted decorations,
and we see it in the middle of each door of the
monumental armoire shown in Fig. 51.

1 Figs. 40 and 44.

2 A rhomboid, to give it its proper name.

3 Fig. 51.

BURGUNDIAN STYLE 117

The furniture with diamond point ornament
of which we have spoken up to the present was
made by Gascon joiners ; nowhere else was this
motive so high in favour, employed in such
perfection, or so long in going out of fashion as
in Gascony and in Guienne. It was largely used
in Burgundy as well, but in a different spirit.
Sobriety, clear-cutness, purity of lines, were
never qualities of the Burgundian style. There ^
pyramids on lozenge and triangular bases were
too often used as a surcharge, so to speak, upon
rectangular panels with hollowed corners, giving
a certain clumsiness of effect, and later, well into
the eighteenth century, even on those panels
with curved outlines belonging to the Louis XV
style, which was indeed one of the worst errors
in taste that a craftsman could commit. It made
it necessary to curve the sides of the pyramid,
and so to destroy its characteristic trenchant
firmness, which one may not specially like, but
which is the foundation for the quite special,
slightly harsh, flavour of this style.

Great horizontal cornices, parallel mouldings
regular spirals, triangles and polyhedra, a frequent
total absence of curved lines, sharp arrises, angles
of every opening ; all this is precise, geometrical,
abstract, intentional, strict and severe in correct-
ness, without fancifulness, and therefore in
harmony with the general spirit of the period of
Descartes, of the Arnaulds, of Nicole, of Poussin,
of Philippe de Champaigne.

I Figs. 47 aud 49.

CHAPTER TWO: DIFFERENT
PIECES OF FURNITURE

it In

the seventeenth century the decay of the

coffer still progresses. It is still indeed, in

modest homes, the essential and often even the

I only piece of furniture ; but it is ceasing to be a

I thing of elegance — except of course the marriage

coffer (or corbez7/e), small, highly decorated,

i very refined, on which a Boulle will not disdain

j to lavish all the resources of his art. As with

; other pieces of furniture, the fashion under

I Louis XIII is to conceal coffers under stuffs; for

• this express purpose there were made tapts ci

\ pentes, that is to say, with four pieces each

! prolonging the side of a rectangle ; these pieces

hung down to the ground and came together

I exactly at the corners, or they were often even

[ buttoned edge to edge. Sometimes a garniture

of stuff or tapestry was nailed upon a coffer of

plain wood. Thus, in the house of Marie Cresse,

wife of Jean Poquelin, the king's tapissier^ and

mother of Moli^re, "a large square coffer hahiit^

with lock and key, covered with needlework

tapestry, with flowers, with its frame and legs in

walnut." But most frequently these bahuts,

which continued to serve as trunks upon occasion,

were clad in red or black leather and covered

with gilt-headed nails forming decorative designs.

I That is to say, with flat lid and not arched as was the bahut
properly so-called.

THE CABINET 119

Large or small, coffers were, even more usually
than in the preceding century, placed as we have
just seen upon frames with four legs or on real
tables made for the purpose and fitted with
drawers,^ or again on a kind of special trestle;
we find in an inventory of 1654, "a large coffre
a bahut covered with black leather with nails,
sitting upon two little walnut seats."

In the meantime the coffer resting on the
ground and capable of being used as a seat was
still in existence, especially in antechambers, and
that even in the king's household. Mme. de
Montpensier relates in her Memoirs how at
Fontainebleau Turenne came one morning to
pay his court to her as she was about to " take
her chemise "... and had " to wait half an
hour in the antechamber sitting on the coffers."
That is a consecrated phrase that shows that
such a way of being seated was still customary.
But coffers were very speedily to come to seem
very old-fashioned among the great folk.

The cabinet, on the contrary, was now at the
height of favour, it was the last word in elegant
furniture. It was a point of honour to possess
one of the finest taste, just as it was to have a
handsome state bed. They were brought, as we
have seen, at great expense from Germany, the
Low Countries, or Italy ; there are some to be
found of every size, from the little coffer of
embroidered velvet placed on the corner of a
table to the monumental piece held up by twelve
I Fig, 31.

I20 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

terminals ; of every material from engraved
mother of pearl and gilt repousse iron to ebony,
tortoise-shell, ivory, v^ith fine stones set in silver
gilt. Some are of unheard-of richness, and
others, among the middle classes of moderate
wealth, quite plainly made of walnut. These
last are very like buffets, and to speak correctly,
the word " cabinet " in the seventeenth century,
especially in the provinces, denotes not costly
pieces filled with small drawers, but buffets or
even real cupboards.

The cabinet or buffet from Guyenne, repro-
duced in Fig. 39, is a very typical example, with
its big turned carafe-balusters for supports, its
two guichets with bevelled high projecting panel,
its sober decoration of upright plumes, its hinges,
keyhole plates, and drawer handles still very
small. As the style evolved, these metal fittings
gradually become larger, especially the hinges
on pins, and assumed a decorative value ; the
handles ^ and the buttons on rosettes ^ cut out of
sheet-iron were to give place to flattened ^ or
gadrooned^ knobs and to drop handles, often
made of two dolphins ^ set face to face ; the key-
hole plates took what was to remain the tra-
ditional shape down to the period of Louis XVI,
a winged dragon more or less recognisable.^

These details — on the supposition that the

1 Figs. 36 and 39.

2 Fig. 38.

3 Figs. 40 and 44,

4 Fig. 45.

5 Fig. 48.

6 Figs. 44, 46, 48, etc.

CUPBOARDS lai

metal fittings have not been changed from the
original ones — are still the least uncertain data
for fixing the date of pieces belonging to this
style, a date that in any case is very much an
approximation only.

But it was above all the cupboard that \y
triumphed among middle-class furniture in the j
seventeenth century. There is, so to say, neither *
shape, nor arrangement, nor size of cupboard ij
that is not found in the Louis XIII style. //

Now that life had become more stable, and
that seats were to be found everywhere, the
cupboard dethroned the coffer, and took its place
as the fundamental and essential piece of furni-
ture. It served, in divers shapes, as refuge for
all that one possessed and that was worth locking
up : clothes, linen, plate, silver, for books
among the lettered, for tools among workers ; in
the kitchen it served as a buffet . . . indeed, was
there anything it did not serve for ?

Its varieties are legion. To begin with the
most ancient types, there was the square cup-
board with four doors, with small flat panels,
monastic in its simplicity. Modest in its
dimensions, it sometimes squats on a frame with
four turned legs, Hke a coffer^ ; if larger it rests
on flattened balls.^ It looks like a mural cup-

1 Fig. 32.

2 Fig. 33. This one has a cornice that is too small (less
projecting than the base) for it not to have originally been
crowned with a pediment Nearly all these pediments, which
were fixed and fragile, have disappeared or been replaced.
When the cornice projects boldly (Figs. 35, 40, 44, etc.), it forms
a sufficient crown and there never has been a pediment.

122 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

board (one built-in) that has been detached from
the wall.

Then we have a shape recalling the Renaissance
by its restricted dimensions and the setting back
of its upper story, the small cupboard in two
parts with two doors, often delightful for its fine
proportions, the delicacy of its decoration made
up of mouldings j turning, and pierced iron fittings.
We give two good examples of this type. The
first ^ of these, with two superimposed drawers,
is remarkable because it is complete and com-
pletely untouched by the restorer — a very rare
combination ; it has preserved its graceful pedi-
ment with the little platform for a statuette or
turned vase ; the carving on it is far from
commonplace, with its curious rendering of the
plume and the acanthus leaf ; the pillars are
very pretty. The second ^ has unfortunately lost
its pediment; its eagle's talons are of excellent
workmanship.

Next comes the tall narrow cupboard, with
two doors and two parts duplicating one another,
or at any rate of the same width, and separated
by a drawer ; we reproduce two specimens —
one^ with diamond points, or more strictly
pointes de gateau ^ corner columns and a hand-
some boldly projecting cornice ; the other ^ com-
pletely covered with carvings, pretty naive in
execution, made in the south-west of France

1 Fig. 37.

2 Fig. 38.

3 Fig. 40.

4 Fis- 41-

CUPBOARDS 123

but slightly Flemish in aspect — which are a very
harmonious pair.

More squat in shape, the cupboard of Fig. 42
is full of character ; we have indicated above the
interesting use the joiner made of mouldings to
decorate its surfaces. The pediment (except the
turned vases) is old and curious, with its two
great palms or ostrich feathers carved in the
thickness of the walnut planking. Note the
asymmetry of the drawers ; only the one on
the right shuts with lock and key, but a kind of
inside wooden bolt, that can only be worked on
pulling out this first drawer, allows the one on
the left to be fastened. This economy of one
lock displays a rather pleasing rusticity ; it is far
from uncommon. The ball feet of this pretty
cupboard are relatively small, very slightly
flattened, and disengaged ; which is an almost
certain proof that the date of its making is much
earlier than that of the cupboards with highly
developed feet, very flattened, shaped like rather
ugly cushions,^ which seem intended to spare
the sharp and delicate corners of the base from
a knock with a broom, a chair-leg, or perhaps a
man's boot.

Among the cupboards in two parts with four
doors, more advanced in style than those with
sixteen small panels, of which we spoke at the
beginning of this chapter, some continue to have
the two parts equal in width, which gives them
a heavy square-shouldered air that is, at the first
I Fig. 48, and especially Figs. 44 and 49.

124 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

glance, by no means agreeable. Such cupboards
were made practically everywhere, in Normandy,
in Auvergne, in the south-west, but chiefly in
the east, in Burgundy, Bresse, Franche-Comte,
and more especially in the county of Mont-
beliard. The Montbeliard cupboards, which the
present-day jargon of the dealers calls armoires
trotestantes^ "Protestant cupboards," doubtless
because there are many Lutherans in this region,
are very curious.^ They are composed of two
superimposed sections, separated by two drawers,
and flanked or not flanked by spiral pillars ; the
panels are most frequently a table saillante 2LndL
the sides equipped with four large iron drop
handles, as though they were really two separate
pieces of furniture, two coffers with doors set
one on top of the other and made for frequent
journeyings. The carving on these is heavy and
thick, especially on the pediments, which are
composed of big rinceaux in open-work, and
more Teutonic than French in manner ; in fact,
the Germanic influence was for a long time
much stronger in this country than the French
influence, for the county of Montbeliard was a
part of the Empire and under the Duchy of
Wurtemburg before 1792. The cupboard we
have chosen for reproduction Ms of a somewhat
uncommon elegance, thanks to its pretty cornice
and the rinceaux of a certain fineness carved
upon it.
The Gascon type in this category of cupboards
I Fig. 35.

CUPBOARDS Its

uniform in width is sometimes less squat in
shape, because they are provided below with a
large drawer that forms a soubassement.

But the greatest number of the Louis XIII
cupboards in two parts have the upper part
narrower than the lower, the difference being
greatest in the oldest examples. Certain very-
wide pieces, for instance, the cupboard with such
amusingly naive carvings reproduced in Fig. 36,
have a middle part with three drawers, and a
neutral piece, between the doors, of excessive
size, which makes them far from convenient.
The cupboard in question looks mean at the
top, as though beheaded ; it should have a
pediment. There are slenderer ones whose doors
hinge on narrow uprights, and which have only
a small square- fronted layette coulisse between
two drawers,^ or else two drawers only ; others
have two pull-out shelves as well. And lastly,
the most elaborate and complicated have four
drawers, like the monumental piece shown in
Fig. 44, so tall that it is impossible to reach the
top shelves of the upper part without standing
on a stool.

We have lost the habit of cupboards in two
parts, and that is why to-day they are generally
regarded, and used, as buffets ; and indeed they
serve very well in that guise. The narrow cup-
board with only one door was also known, as we
see by the one shown in Fig. 45. Gascon in
origin, typical with its soubassement fitted with
I Fig. 43.

126 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

a drawer and its large and very austere diamond
points. The one shown in the next figure, with-
out a drawer and larger in its proportions, is
more complicated in decoration but has less
mouldings ; the flat enframement of the door,
contrasted with the mouldings on the body of
the piece, gives it a quite different character
from that of the cupboards in Figs. 45, 47 and
48 ; it was certainly made in Brittany. The
Burgundian cupboard of Fig. 47 is, so to say,
chopped up to the last degree, and offers not a
single plane surface, no rest for the eye ; in that
it is very much of its native land. The one
that follows (Fig. 48) is from Bordeaux, and has
a most elaborate fa9ade, highly tormented in its
composition ; the narrowness of the door is note-
worthy. It is made of handsome light-coloured
walnut with what is a somewhat uncommon
feature, some of its mouldings enamelled in black.
The cornice is an imposing thing.

And lastly, the largest and most majestical are
those with two doors shutting, either one upon
the other with a false neutral portion,^ or on
a fixed upright.^ We give illustrations of two
from Gascony and one from Burgundy ; and here
again the style of the latter appears confused
and overloaded when compared with the fine clear
definiteness of the others, especially of the one
in Fig. 51, whose main lines, as well as the
composition of the panels, are beyond reproach.

1 Fig. 51. ' — ^

2 Fig. 50.

CUPBOARDS 127

The large drawers below are a veritable certificate
of origin.

The subdivision of the doors of large cup-
boards into three panels by means of traverses —
division into two panels also was to be known —
was to become classic in subsequent periods. It
was by no means a decorative fancy, but a
necessity if those great doors were to be sub-
stantial, and especially to keep their shape.

If we examine attentively these two cupboards,
with twist pillars, we will perceive the two ways ^^^^^^^^^^
in which these pillars were used. Sometimes
a rectangular section was cut out of them all
along their length, and they were glued on the
arrises which fitted into the gap thus left in
them ^ ; sometimes they were left intact and
fastened at top and bottom, but disengaged,
standing in a place prepared for them by cutting
away the upright for the purpose.^

We have said that cupboards in two parts
served from the very beginning, and still serve,
as buffets, either intact or reduced to the con-
dition of under-cupboards {bas d''armoires) by
the disappearance of the upper part. Then,
from the end of the seventeenth century, under-
cupboards in the Louis XIII style were made
by themselves, and lastly, at an undetermined
period, they sometimes had placed upon them
vaisseliers or dressers with two or three shelves,

1 Fig. 50.

2 Fig. 51, also Figs. 37, 38, 40 and 44. This last method is
much to be preferred.

128 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

surmounted by a moulded cornice.^ Let us add,
for the sake of completeness, that in the pro-
vinces, where the diamond point long remained
in favour, we find armoires d'encoignure, later
called encoigntires^ or corner cupboards, of tri-
angular plan, dating from the eighteenth century.

Tables of the Louis XIII style that while
simple are yet slightly ornamented, can hardly
have been made before the second half of the
seventeenth century, since the fashion up to that
time was to have them hidden, during meals
with tablecloths, at other times with tapestries
that covered them down to the ground.^ Those
that really belong to the Louis XIII period —
and there are practically none now surviving —
have turned legs shaped like swollen pillars, all
plain, and carried on a rectangular frame with
stout cross-bars, on which the feet were set while
one sat at table, because the chairs were very
high. This frame was itself supported on four
ball feet.

A little later tables were the proper and
peculiar domain of the turners : here they dis-
played all the resources of their art. The legs
were turned as plain pillars,^ spirals,^ en chapelet ^
(beaded), or baluster-shaped.^ This last type can

1 Fig. 52.

2 We are not referring here, of course, to the show tables
with tops of stone mosaic, or wood marquetry, or metal and
tortoise-shell. There were no special dining-tables in existence
any more than dining-rooms.

3 Figs. 56 and 57.

4 Figs. 53, 54, etc.

5 Fig. 62.

6 Figs. 58 to 61.

TABLES 129

be by far the most elegant and graceful ; we
find some the outline of which is deliciously
fine. The H -shaped stretcher is the most j\
common ; its cross-piece has in the middle either
a simple ornament that forms an integral part of
it,^ or a vase, a knob or some other motive
fastened upon it.^ Some more complicated tables
have, carried at the middle point of this cross-
bar, a supplementary pillar-leg, and four long
turned pieces [candelahres) fixed underneath the
table properly so-called, and hanging down, like
stalactites ; this is a last memory of the arcadings
that embellished the under-part of the fine
Renaissance tables.

A gracefuUer type, lighter of aspect and later ft
in date, is the table with X-shaped stretcher,^ j]
which nearly always belongs to the period of //
Louis XIV. The curving branches of the X are
cut out of a plank ; their ends are not mortised
into the piliers ; they 'are carried by four
flattened balls and support the legs in their
turn. The intersection is adorned with a piece
of turned work and sometimes rests upon a fifth
foot in the shape of a ball/

The most ornate tables of solid wood have the
frieze carved with gadroons or arabesques; more
frequently the quadrantal moulding of the top
is incised with a running ornament of demi-
rosaces ; the front of the drawer, when it is of

1 Figs. 53 and 56.

2 Figs. 55, 58, 62.

3 Figs. 54 and 59.

4 Fig. 54.

130 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

a certain depth, may be decorated with raised
panels, lozenge and triangle-shaped like those we
have seen on cupboards.

The seventeenth century saw many varieties of
tables, if not actually born, at least come into
current use. As for their shape, they were almost
all rectangular. At the same time, some were
made round, oval, or octagonal. The round
table, the shape of which, as everyone knows, has
the advantage that it does away with all difficulties
with regard to etiquette, is supposed to have
become pretty common in Paris, in imitation of
the one round which Mazarin used to assemble
his guests. The oldest round table of carved and
gilded wood that has come down to us,^ is, they
say, the last flotsam of Foucquet's furniture at
Vaux-le-Vicomte.

To be able to diminish or increase the size of
the table at pleasure, we saw that from the
sixteenth century there had been tables brisees^
or tables ployantes^ and tables qui se tirent.
We reproduce in Fig. 53 a small table brisee
with two flaps, and in Fig. 57 the small hybrid
piece, half bench and half low table — in short, a
basset brise — which an inventory of the time
describes as follows : " a little walnut table which
folds in three, iron-shod and set on a frame."
The gaming table of Fig. 62 is a very curious
piece : folding in three, its surface doubles
when it is opened out ; it has a hole in the middle
to hold a basin, meant to receive the stakes,
I In the Louvre,

EXTENDING TABLES 131

which is one of those platters of repousse latten
made in Germany and Flanders, the central
decoration of which is so often, as in this case, the
wonderful bunch of the grapes of Canaan carried
by the two Hebrews.

Other folding tables have not only the top,
but also the under-frame '' qui se brtse " ; for
example, the very pretty marquetry table with
six legs seen in Fig. 60 ; unfortunately the
photograph does not show the elegant rinceaux
of inlaid wood that cover the top and edge of the
table itself. The next plate (Fig. 61) shows a
table with '' broken frame," the two large flaps of
which, when lifted up, more than treble the sur-
face. Four of its baluster legs have been sawed
down the middle, and the halves come together
when the table is shut.

The table s* allongeant^ or table qui se tire
par les deux bouts or table tirante — and other
names as well — was the table a rallonges, or
extending table of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. In the sixteenth century the most
magnificent were of this kind ; those that date
from the seventeenth are simpler and have a pro-
nounced southern character. Four great baluster
legs, sometimes diverging, are joined together at
the bottom by a rectangular frame of stout cross-
bars ; they carry a thick top, often parquetted
like a floor ; two supplementary leaves are con-
cealed under the first one; when these are
pulled out, an arrangement of slanting grooves
slides them up to the level of the fixed top, at

132 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

each end of which they come into place ; the
length of the table is not quite doubled in this
fashion. Cabinet-makers and furniture dealers of
to-day call these leaves rallonges a Titalienne,
An important invention of the joiners of this
period was the bureau. Is it a specialised table ?
Or is it a transformation of the cabinet ? It is
both, and in any case this affiliation is of small
moment. The bureau was first of all a stuff, a
kind of bure ; then a table cover made of it,
next a table kept covered with such a cloth, and
lastly a table specially made to write at con-
veniently, with drawers for the escritoire and
papers. Cabinets being high in favour, a com-
bination of cabinet and bureau was devised.
Sully tells us in his Memoirs, " He (Henry IV)
desired me to have made for him a kind of
cabinet or large bureau elegantly wrought and
entirely fitted with drawers all shutting with lock
and key, and lined with crimson satin." Some
of these very luxurious cabinet-bureaus have been
preserved. The Cluny Museum has one, known
as " Marechal Crequi's bureau." This is a
cabinet of very simple lines, quadrangular, with
numerous drawers of marquetry on a background
of tortoise-shell, sitting back on a table support
fitted with larger drawers ; the difference in the
depth of the two parts permits of a writing desk
in front. Another type, more akin to a table, if
one may say so, has no cabinet above, but two
series of superimposed drawers on either side of
a space left for the legs of whoever sits down to

BEDS 133

write ; it is the direct ancestor of the " bureau
ministre/' This was known as a bureau f agon
de table.

We have still less to say about Louis XIII
beds than about the beds of the sixteenth
century; in the seventeenth they were more
than ever, from the sub-basement to the vase-
shaped knobs that adorned the corners of the
tester, hidden and buried under an incredible
pile of stuffs. Neither the more modest ones
under their red serge, nor the most sumptuous,
covered with velours nuance with gold back-
ground, three-coloured damask, and other
*^ grandes estofes " edged with a ^^ passemeni
luysant de Tours^^^ ^ or, in summer time, with
Dutch Hnen cloth with stripes of " reseuil,^''^ none
of them showed as much as a square inch of wood
Thus they had no claim to be preserved ; there
have been none of them, so to speak, in existence
for the last two centuries. It would be easy to
make exact copies of them ; but who would be
willing to sleep in those hermetically sealed boxes
of stuffs ?

There remain the various forms of seats. And
here there arises a small but irritating problem.
What, in the first half of the seventeenth century,
was a fauteuil and what was a chaise h bras ?
In the sixteenth century there was no difficulty;
the faudesteutl, as we have seen, folded Hke
pincers ; the chaise h bras was rigid, square,

1 Coloured silk lace.

2 Guipure or embroidery on filet.

:i

134 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

very high ; the caquetoire was smaller and lighter.
Under Louis XIV every chair v^ith arms and a
back is a fauteuil ; but under Louis XIII — ?
We find, in inventories and other contemporary
documents, at one tvcci^ fauteuils 2indL at another
chaises a bras. The most probable answer is
that the chaise a bras had a high back, and the
fauteuil a low back. And in fact we see, in an
inventory of 1628, six "chaires a vertugadin "
. . . four '' chaires , , . a dossier ^ fa^on de
fauteuil,''^ and three " chaires a bras et a dossier."
But in many other cases no sign of any difference
can be discovered.

Another difficulty presents itself when we turn
over the collections of plates, invaluable in the
highest degree for our knowledge of habits,
costume and furniture under Louis XIII, that
Abraham Bosse etched with a needle somewhat
too proper and bourgeois, but exceedingly
elegant. In none of the interiors he delineates
with a great deal of fancifulness as regards
architecture, and an evident exactness as to
furniture, do we find a single chair with a high
back. In 1661 arm-chairs with low backs were
in no wise as yet superannuated ; it was in this
kind of chair that Louis XIV and Marie-Therese
sat at their marriage ceremony. It seems likely
enough that in the days of Henri IV it was
perceived that the tall vertical back of the chair e
a bras was the enemy of the huge ruffs and the
great stiff collars the ladies wore ; arm-chairs with
low backs were made, at first alongside of the high

ARM-CHAIRS 135

backed 'chairs, but from about 1625 they held
the field alone. After Louis XIII the back
became higher once more and at the same time
more sloping, without the fauteuil losing its
name, and after a short eclipse the chaise a bras
was seen reappearing under this usurped name
oi fauteuil. But it was by that time already a
Louis XIV seat.

The Louis XIII arm-chair, properly so called,*
is then a seat with arms and a low back, stiff and
poor in line, as must be confessed, square at all
points, and the back very slightly or not at all
sloped backwards. The legs of arm-chairs and
" vertugadin " chairs were sometimes simple
pillars standing on a square frame carried on four
balls,^ sometimes they were turned en chapelet^'^
en spirale,^ or en halustre} The back legs may
well not be turned, for the sake of economy.*
The cross-pieces of the stretchers are put together
in the form of an H ; nearly always there is a
supplementary cross-piece joining the front legs
above ; this both strengthens and decorates at
the same time. It should be noted that the legs
have often been slightly shortened. ^ The period
with which we are now concerned is the one in
which chairs became gradually lowered to the

1 Figs. 63 to 65, 68.

2 Fig. 67.

3 Figs. 63 and 64.

4 Figs. 65, 69 and 70.

5 Figs. 68, 71 and 72.

6 Figs. 64, 69. 71, 72.

7 Figs. 63, 70. The same may be seen in tables {cj. Fig. 62)
as the height of these was closely related to that of the seats.

136 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

height to which they rose again in the nineteenth
century, after having been a trifle lower in the
eighteenth.

The back is regularly rectangular, much less in
height than in width ; the arms of arm-chairs are
horizontal, turned like the legs, and rest upon
consoles d^ accotoirs^ which are a continuation of
the front legs ; they end in a simple turned
button or, when there is a little carving, in a
lion's head or ram's head. A motive that is far
from rare is a female bust serving as the upper-
most part of the console ^ ; the end of the arm
is mortised into the back of the head.

The small arm-chair, loftily perched upon
splaying legs, which allows a child to sit at an
ordinary table,^ then made its appearance, as
well as the one with short legs on which it could
sit down without help on the ground level.

About chairs there is nothing to be said ; they
differ from the arm-chairs solely by the absence
of arms ^ ; but it has become a habit to assign the
Louis XIII style to large chairs with high backs
completely covered and with seats nowlow^ (about
^l^ ^g^ 35 centimetres) and now of ordinary height^ (45
^, centimetres). To be quite truthful, it is exceed-

1 We are here anticipating a little in using this expression,
which was to enter the joiners' vocabulary when this part of the
arm-chair commonly presented the shape of an architectural
console.

2 Fig. 65.

3 Fig. 66.

4 Figs. 67, 69, 70.

5 Fig. 71. These low chairs are called chauffcuscs; the word is
quite modern.

6 Fig. 72.

STOOLS 137

ingly hard to decide their exact period ; but it
is very probable that this tall upholstered back
with no space between it and the seat dates only
from Louis XIV. The chair reproduced in
Fig. 74 is a very pretty one, and very original.
It is all of wood ; the raw simplicity of the frieze
and the top of the legs, while all the rest is finely
carved, shows that it was meant to have a flat
cushion with long fringes or valances ; the back
is merely an empty frame ; it has been filled up,
in the museum where the chair has found its
last refuge, with a plain sheet of cardboard
covered with velvet. In short, we have here a
very refined variant of the humble wooden chair
of the Lorraine peasants ; the characteristic
accolade shaping is found in the lower part of
the back. This is an escabelle a dos; it was a
very real and distinct kind of seat.

The ordinary escabelle in Fig. 73 is a very
agreeable model ; it is rather, from its height, a
basset, that small piece with two ends, a seat on
occasion, an occasional table at all times, the
folding variety of which we have already seen.
To come to an end of the kinds of seats without
backs, there remains to be noticed the family of
tabourets and placets, whose height varies
between 20 and 50 centimetres, and among
which even the lowest served to sit on as well as
for a foot-rest.^

The rest-bed seems to have been invented
about 1625 or 1630 ; we mention it here because
I Figs. 77 and 78.

138 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

from its earliest days it commonly served as a
seat. Mme. de Motteville, describing the arrest
of the Prince de Conti, in 1650, writes: "The
Prince de Conti did not say a word. He remained
still seated on the small rest-bed that was in
the gallery, and displayed neither fear nor
vexation. . . ." And six years later, according
to the great Mademoiselle, in the Chateau de
Chilly, " the Queen of England sat upon a rest-
bed, and her circle was larger than it had ever
been, all the princesses and duchesses in Paris
being in it." The rest-bed was made with either
one or two dossiers, and with six or eight
turned legs like the legs of arm-chairs. From it
the canape or sofa was to issue before long,
meant mainly for sitting and, as a secondary use,
for lying down ; but it did not exist before the
Louis XIV period. The canape of Fig. 75 is
interesting as evidence of the long survival of
the Louis XIII style in middle-class furniture ;
the manchettes or arm cushions testify to the
end of the reign of Louis XIV, perhaps even the
Regency, as the date of its making.

The greatest change that took place with
regard to seats in the seventeenth century was
that on most of them the movable upholstery of
square cushions, round cushions, and tapestry,
was replaced by fixed upholstery nailed on to
the frame-work. It was perhaps not so great an
advance in comfort or ease as might be imagined,
but it was a great advance in handiness in use.

The simplest form oi garniture was made of a

UPHOLSTERY 139

thick ox hide, stretched on the frame of seat and
back by means of big decorative nails with gilt
brass heads. These seats, as we have said, were
Spanish or Flemish in make, or indeed made in
France in imitation of imported examples.
Nothing can be more Spanish than this decoration
of big nails ; witness those that in the Peninsula
adorn so many ancient church doors, and are
sometimes real masterpieces of metal work. The
hide was either plain, ^ or stamped with gilt
tooling,^ blind tooled, escorchie^ courtepointe, as
in the preceding period ; the nails, of different
sizes and shapes, lend themselves to very
decorative combinations.'

Goat skin was not sufficiently thick or strong
to be stretched by itself, without backing or
support ; but courtepointe leather was frequently
morocco. The most sought after skins were
bright red or yellow, and came from Asia Minor
and Syria ; they were grained in France, at
Rouen in special. Red morocco was mounted
with gilt nails, and yellow with silvered nails. It
was not unusual to match a certain number of
seats, arm-chairs, forms, tabourets, and later, a
sofa, with a six-leaved screen, all in the same
morocco, and this collection made up a
'^ meuble,^^

1 Figs. 69 and 70.

2 Fig. 63. The decoration of this back is a classic : in the
middle, armorial bearings with highly developed crest and
lambrequins; around this a framing of rinceaux and in the
comers ionv flcnrons.

3 Figs. 63, 69 and 70.

I40 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

Certain very magnificent seats had a gorgeous
dress of the goffered leather, gilded and painted
''in the Moorish style," that made such hand-
some wall coverings, especially in antechambers.
This came from Spain, from Flanders, from
Holland ; it was made also in France.

But seats covered with morocco or gilded
leather were most usually fitted in the same way
as those done in stuffs. Upon an ox hide or on
straps there was spread, not a regulation
"' embonrriire " but a simple layer of horsehair,
of no great thickness ; on this there was stretched
a stout canvas or sheep's leather,* and lastly the
skin, the stuff, or the tapestry for the outer
covering, which was nailed on either with clous
touchans^^ or with big nails spaced out on a
galoon of gold or silver or silk ; or again, small
nails were grouped en marguerites^^ daisy
pattern, on this galoon.

All too often old seats have, in the nineteenth
century, been fitted with the ugly modern
garniture with springs ; every amateur worthy
of the name who becomes the owner of a chair
or arm-chair thus disfigured will have it stripped
of its springs and re-upholstered in the ancient
manner ; if it is a question of a rest-bed or a
sofa, the movable mattress will be the only
possible thing.

During a century, from 1570 to 1670, or

1 The phrase was " un fautetUl garni de ctiir, ct convert cie
velours.'*

2 Small nails touching one another.

3 Figs. 67, 69.

STUFFS 141

thereabouts, a great proportion of all seats, like
the beds, were covered completely, including
their legs, with a nailed-on stuff that was usually
velvet ; the wood of which they were made was
common, rudely put together, and all, it goes
without saying, have been destroyed. Such were
the arm-chairs, in blue velvet covered with fleurs-
de-lis, of Louis XIV and Marie-Therese we men-
tioned above. The great advantage of these
upholstery trappings was that, for a ceremony to
take place at a distance, such as that royal
marriage in 1661 at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, they <y
were carried along all prepared, and any joiner
could knock up the wooden arm-chairs on which
they were nailed. Taken off after the ceremony,
they served again when a new occasion arose. ^

Stuffs for seats were, in principle, the same as
for beds. There was a bed in each of the im-
portant rooms of a suite, and a few seats matched
this bed, in particular the arm-chairs ranged on
either side of the alcove. We find recorded, for
instance, " the seats and arm-chairs of the bed in
crimson damask." The Cluny Museum possesses,
almost intact, one of these suites, called in the old
days ^' emmeublements^'' ^ which have become
excessively rare. The hangings of the bed (said
to have belonged to the Marechal d' Effiat ; but

1 We find, in the Mazarin inventory, "Three garnitures dc
fautetiils, each composed of eleven pieces, covered with plain
embroideries, two serving as back and valance and the others
serving to cover all the wood of the arm-chair, etc."

2 A complete cmmciiblcvtcut included also stools, folding
stools, square cushions, table covers, all in the same stuff.

142 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

we know how such ascriptions call for caution)
are of crimson chased velvet and pink silk with
applique embroideries, alternating in wide stripes ;
the arm-chairs are covered with the same two
stuffs in compartments.

Seats were dressed also in stuffs of " plain " silks,
that is to say, without pieces laid on or applique;
plain and wrought velvets, damasks, satins,
brocades, taffetas, gros de Nwbles and de Tours,
and many others, and if they were of the simpler
kinds, in moquette, Orleans or Aumale or Mouy
serge, red, green or yellow. These stuffs were
often embroidered, sometimes even en plain ^ so
that they disappeared entirely under the stitchery
of wool, silk, or gold ; the Hungarian stitch, h
bastons rompus, was in high favour. They were
also manure es with gold or silver cord — the
modern word would be souiachees. Lastly,
needlework tapestry, in coarse or fine stitch, or
both combined, was patiently wrought in the
various households, even the highest, even the
King's, by women who, despite the progress of
worldly life and manners, had long empty hours
to fill in their homes.

The favourite motives for embroidery and
needlework were large flowers and fruits done in
natural colours. We know that the Jardin du
Roi, the Jardin des Plantes of to-day, was
expressly established under Henri IV, by the
gardener Jean Robin and by Pierre Vallet, the
i\ king's embroiderer, to provide the embroiderers
both male and female with new models inspired

STUFFS 143

by exotic plants. Gaston d'Orleans, the brother
of Louis XIII, also had at Blois his garden of
rare plants, which were drawn and engraved by
Robert, his embroiderer and painter in ordinary.

To finish off these garnitures the com-
partments were outlined with galoons, the
surfaces bedecked with lace, gold fringes and
edgings hung around the seat and the lower
part of the back, frangeons or mollets* followed
the other contours. Certain seats were even
surrounded, in imitation of beds and tables, with
a jut)e^ or petticoat, composed of four valances
of stuff that fell from the four sides of the frieze
to the ground.

As several of these stuffs were extremely costly
and very frail — white satins embroidered au
passe, taffetas " dying-rose "-coloured, Venice
brocatelles with flame-coloured background — and
as the persons accustomed to make use of seats
were excessively dirty ^ — however splendid they
were to look at — armchairs and costly chairs
were continually protected by loose covers.
These were serge, or even in more lavish homes,
such as Mazarin's, for instance, or Nicolas
Foucquet's, or the Marechal d'Humieres', they

I There are the fullest proofs of the incredible dirtiness of the
people of the seventeenth century, even up to the very summit
of the social scale. Heroard, the doctor to the Dauphin, the
future Louis XIII, writes in his Notes about the young prince,
under the date October 3, 1606: "At a quarter to nine, his
clothes taken off." (This refers to the little Dauphin, then six
years of age.) " His legs were washed in tepid water, in the
Queen's basin: it was the first time." A manual of polite
conduct, published in 1640, recommends its reader to wash " the
hands every day, and the face nearly as often."

144 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

were made of silk stuffs such as velvet or taffeta
of one plain colour, with gold galoon at the
corners and fringes on the lower part. To take
off the loose covers was decouvrir; this was only
done in well defined cases, and it was an important
problem of etiquette to know for whom they
were to be removed, and for whom they were
ii not.
^Lm/f^^ The reader may wonder perhaps that we do
Kz::^:^^ not mention here the seats whose backs were
made of a narrow '^ caned " panel framed with
very full pierced carvings, and whose seats also
were caned, with the twist or console-shaped legs
joined in front by a broad cross-piece covered
with carving. In the old furniture trade, in
many a sale catalogue and even in recent books
on the French styles, they arecalled " LouisXIII."
Now these chairs " de dot's de caiifie a Jour,'* ^
as they were described, are neither French in
origin or in spirit, but Flemish or Dutch, nor
are they Louis XIII in period or in style. It
was only at the very end of the seventeenth
century that they were made in the Low
Countries, then imported and finally imitated in
France.

On the other hand, straw seats were common
from the end of the sixteenth ; but it appears
that it was only towards 1660 that, thanks to
the flat movable cushions or the silk loose covers
with which they were provided, they found a
place elsewhere than in convent cells or kitchens
and offices, and that they were given a slightly

STRAW CHAIRS 145

more refined structure. There are none in

existence, so far as we know, which can claim

date or style before the last years of the reign of

Louis XIV. We are enabled to learn with

complete exactness the fashion of such chairs in

convents, from a picture by Philippe de

Champaigne, the double portrait of Mother

Catherine-Agnes Arnauld and Sister Catherine

de Sainte-Suzanne ; they are merely very

ordinary kitchen chairs without the shadow of a

style.

# * * • *

How can we to-day make use of Louis XIII
furniture ? In Paris, in those small bright boxes
in which, with rare exceptions, we are reduced
to living, and which all, alas ! pretend to some
vague eighteenth century style, it is very difficult
to find a way of using them, for it is mostly
large and sombre.

At the most we might make a homogeneous
ensemble with, for instance, a walnut or ebony
cabinet, or an under-cupboard, a cupboard in
two parts if not over large, a table or two with
twist or baluster legs, a few arm-chairs covered
with hide, or with plain velvet, perhaps with old
pieces of needlework tapestry, but 7iot with those
scraps of low-warp tapestry, known as " verdure
de Flandres^' with which dealers have for some
years had a regular mania for furbishing them.
The proper place for these verdures is, as far as
possible, on the walls. In the seventeenth
century no one had any scruple in fixing pictures

146 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

and mirrors on the tapestries by means of nails
driven through them ^ ; not yet were they hung
by cords from the cornice. Mirrors and pictures
must have wide and very simple frames, made of
dark walnut or ebony with wavy mouldings.
For lighting there must be an old Dutch lustre
with a big brass ball ; on the floor one or several
carpets, oriental, of course ; they have never
ceased to figure in French interiors from the
fifteenth century to the nineteenth; whether
ancient or modern, they do not '' date," and
accommodate themselves to the neighbourhood of
every style. To make this severe ensemble a
little brighter we may place here and there, still
remaining scrupulously '' within the note of the
period," all the Eastern and Far-Eastern objects
we please ; already they were being collected in
the days of Richelieu and Mazarin, and more than
one shop of "Chinese wares" in the galleries of
the Palace set out its quaint baubles among the
booksellers' quartos and the Venetian guipures of
the lace vendors. Add a dish or two of Manises
f a'lence with the ruddy coppery sheen ; they were
sought out by the name oi porcelaine doree;
lastly a bottle, a cornet^ or a plaque in delft ;
always under the name of porcelaines, the ad-
mirable pottery of Abraham de Kooge and
Albrecht de Keiser and their fellows gleamed
with all the lustre of their incomparable glaze in
all the houses that had any claim to elegance in
1650.

I Abraham Bosse's engravings prove this to the full.

AN INTERIOR 147

But the real place for these old pieces is a huge
provincial mansion — there they will be a marve
of fitness. They are accused of gloominess. Oh,
of course, they have none of the gay smartness of
the Louis XV bonheurs du jour and bergeres.
But the light smiles and twinkles more than one
thinks upon their polished wood ; everywhere it
clings in dancing sparkles to the high points of
the turned parts, and the facets of diamond-
point mouldings kindle geometrical lights in the
very darkest corners. The walnut of cupboards
and tables sometimes remained light in colour,
and many were fashioned out of cherry-wood that
with the lapse of time has taken on a warmth of
tone rivalling mahogany.

In the ancestral home of many an old Gascon
family there is an imposing Louis XIII cupboard
in two parts, serving as dining-room buffet for the
last two centuries, while an under-cupboard with
facetted decoration plays the part of service table.
It would not be very difficult to complete a set
by adding to these a massive table " pulling out
by the ends " ; this will come from another
province, but that will be of no great consequence.
Chairs or even armchairs with twist legs, very
simple ones, will make good table seats ; their
rather pinched lines and low backs will not make
serving difficult. It will not be easy to find a
certain number of these seats all alike. But
nothing in the world — and the dealers know
this only too well ! — is so readily copied as a
Louis XIII table or chair ; in the work of the

148 LOUIS XIII FURNITURE

lathe there is always something mechanical and
impersonal that allows absolute exactness in re-
production, while a piece of carved work is almost
quite beyond imitation. Here again, a Dutch
lustre in the ceiling, and Flemish verdures on
the walls. We must not imagine that in this
way we shall have a faithful restoration of a
dining-room of 1650, since at that moment there
were no dining-rooms, and every meal was taken
in one of those rooms-of-all-work, the main piece
of furniture in which was a bed.

Neither were there any " drawing-rooms." A
strictly Louis XIII drawing-room, therefore,
cannot be. One single point of comfort would
suffice to make it impossible; the seats of the
period were far too unwieldy and uncomfortable.
But isolated pieces of furniture belonging to our
style can be mixed without clashing with Louis
XIV pieces, since in strict reality they are not
two different styles ; and we can see quite reason-
ably in the great drawing-room or the living hall
of a big mansion or a simple country house, a
grandiose cupboard with diamond-point decora-
tion and spiral pillars, and tables, with carafe-
baluster legs ; while in a smoking-room, serving
as a cabinet for tobacco, liqueurs, the para-
phernalia of bridge, even side by side with
comfortable deep English arm-chairs in morocco
leather, what could be better than a pretty little
cupboard in two parts like those shown in our
Figs, 37 and 38 \

Fk;. 3. BUFFKT WITH CANT CORNERS, IRON FITTINGS "A ORBE-VOIES.'

Fig. 4. CHAIR WITH CARVED "SERVIETTE" OR "PARCHEMINS
REPLIES " DECORATIONS (LINENFOLD)

F;o. 5.

CHAIR WITH COFPEB SEAT, "A CLAIRES-VOIES '
IN OAK. FIFTEENTH CENTURY

AND " ORBE-VOIES,

Fia. 6. VERY LARGE CHAIR WITH COFFER SEAT, WITH •'ORBE-VOIES " AND
"PARCHEMINS SIMPLES," IN OAK. FIFTEENTH CENTURY

Fio. 7. SMALL BENCH WITH OPENED END PIECES

y

'. s

Fl(J. 13. CUPBOARD IN TWO PARTS, FROM BURGUNDY, WALNUT.
END OF THE STYLE.

FIG. 14. SMALL CUPBOARD, OF WALNUT INLAID WITH
MARBLE, IN THE STYLE OF THE ILE-DE-FRANCE.
PERIOD OF HENRI IIL

b'^ \

X^. Ln. <iL, J^e^r^^fTvcA^ -^

3

F!0. 15. CUPBOARD WITU LONG PILLARS, WALNUT.
PERIOD OF HENRI III.

Fig. 16. BUFFET CARVED WITH GROTESQUES, OAK.
PERIOD OF, FRANCOIS I.

Fig. 17. LABQE BUFFET WITH PILASTERS, WALNUT

FlO. 19. SMALL TABLE WITH FIXED TRESTLE LEGS CARVED WITH
GRIFFONS, IN WALNUT

FIO. 21. COAIB WITH COFFER SEAT. IN WALNUT. SECOND HALF OF
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

S5»

OS
lift

Fig. 30. CHAIR WITH ARMS, IN THE SPANISH-FLEMISH STYLE,
GILDED LEATHER. REIGN OF HENRI IV

FlO. 31. SMALL NORMAN COFFER ON ITS STAND, IN OAK.
LOUIS XIII STYLE

Fig, 32. CUPBOARD WITH FOUR DOORS AND SMALL PANELS, ON ITS
STAND. NORMANDY, BEGINNING OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

SnHBBSM

—

1

1

i

1

Fig 33. LARGE CUPBOARD WITH FOUR DOORS AND SMALL PANELS,
IN WALNUT. BEGINNING OF THE STYLE

Fig. 34. SMALL CUPBOARD WITH TWO DOORS, OAK AND WALNUT.
DATED 1659 (MODERN METALWORK)

Fio. 36. CUPBOARD IN TWO PARTS FROM THE COUNTY OF MONTB^LIARD

IN OAK

Fig. 36. LARGE CUPBOARD IN TWO PARTS, WALNUT. BEGINNING
OF THE STYLE, WITHOUT ITS PEDIMENT

M'

Fio. 37. SMALL CUPBOARD IN TWO PARTS, WITH TWO DRAWERS,
IN WALNUT

Fig. 38. SMALL CUPBOARD IN TWO PARTS WITH EAGLE FEET, IN WALNUT

I

Fio. 39. CABINET OR BUFFET WITH BALUSTERS AND PLUMES,
IN WALNUT

Fig 40. CABINET IN TWO PARTS WITH CORNICE AND
GATEAU" DECORATION, IN WALNUT

POINTES DE

Fig. 41. GASCON CUPBOARD IN TWO PARTS, ELABORATELY CARVED.

WALNUT

Fig. 42. GASCON CUPBOARD IN TWO PARTS WITH
INTERRUPTED PEDIMENT

1^

Flo. 43. GASCON CUPBOARD IN TWO PARTS IN WALNUT
(MODERN PEDIMENT)

Fig. 44.

VERY LARGE GASCON CUPBOARD WITH CORNICE AND DISENGAGED
PILLARS, IN WALNUT

f,,,^,^^^ Cf J&^^^

16

Fio. 46. GASCONY CUPBOARD WITH DIAMOND POINT
DECORATION, WALNUT

//i'

Fio. 46. CUPBOARD WITH ONE DOOR WITH FLAT DIAMOND POINTS AND
CIRCULAR MOTIVES, IN CHERRYWOOD

'<iA«

iaJI

1^ jHJi

i

^^i23

f.

^

^

FlO. 47. SMALL CUPBOARD IN ONE PIECE, FROM BURGUNDY, WITH
DIAMOND POINTS, IN OAK

Fig. 48. GASCON CUPBOARD WITH LARGE CORNICE, IN WALNUT,
PARTLY PAINTED BLACK

Fig. 49. LARGE BURGUNDIAN CUPBOARD WITH DIAMOND POINTS,
IN WALNUT

Fig. 50. VERY LARGE GASCON CUPBOARD WITH DIAMOND POINTS AND
TWIST ENGAGED PILLARS

V\S'.(>^

Fig. 51. LARGE GASCON CUPBOARD WITH DETACHED PILLARS

K^^i'^^

Fig. 52. GASCON "BUFFET A VAISSELIBR" (DRESSER BUFFET) WALNUT,

Fig. 53. TABLE WITH TWO FLAPS AND TWIST LEGS, IN WALNUT

FlO. 54.

/if

TABLE WITH MOULDING OX DBAVVKR AND TWIST LEGS,
IN WALNUT

Fl<3. 55. BURGUNDIAN TABLE, IN WALNUT

Fig. 56. SMALL TABLE WITH ORNATE DRAWER, IN WALNUT

i_^

Fio. 57. BASSET OR SALALL FOLDING TABLE-ESCABEAU, IN WALNUT

Fig. 58. CHERRYWOOD TABLE WITH TURNED BALUSTERS

Fig. 59. TURNED TABLE FROM PROVENCE WITH X-SHAPED STRETCHER,

IN WALNUT

Figs. 77 and 78. FOOTSTOOLS, POINT TAPESTRY

INDEX-GLOSSARY

Acanthus leaf, decorative

motive, 48, 109
d'Amboise, Cardinal, 41
Androuet, Jacques, architect and

designer of ornament, 61
Arabesques, 51
Archebanc, 24, 25
Arm-chair, Louis XIII, 135
Aubriot, Hugues, Provost of

Paris, his decree quoted

(1371), 14
Azay-le-Rideau, 48

Bahut, 18

Balloches, Perrin, painter, 13

Balusters, $7

Banc a colombes, 4, 25
toumis, 25

Bancelle, 25, 82, 83

Bancs, Renaissance, 36, 75

Banderole, decorative motive, 53

Basset, 23, 82, 83, 137

Beaujeu, Anne de, her marquetry
table, 40

Beds, early forms, 23
Louis XIII, 133
Mazarin's, 106
Renaissance, 35, 39, 75
shut (lits clos), 23

les Blasons domestiques, poem
by Gilles Corrozet, describing
a l6th century house, 32-39

Blois, chateau of, 46

Blondel, architect, 109

Bonafife, writer on French fur-
niture, 58

Bosse, Abraham, engraver of
Louis XIII period, 134

Bouge, 17, 27

Bourbon, Antoine^ de, King of
Navarre, 66 - - V

Bourdichon, Jean, court painter
to Louii XII, 13

Branchi, Italian lapidary in the

service of Louis XIV, 104
Buffet, Burgundian, 70, 71

Louis XIII, 127, 128

Renaissance, 70

varieties of, 20, 69
Bureau, 132

Marechal Crequi's, in Cluny
Museum, 132

"fafon de table," 132, 133

Cabinets, Catherine de Me-
dici's, 42

ebony, 99, 100
elaborateness of, 1 19, 120
Flemish, 105, 106
from Flanders, 43
"German," 100
largely imported, 42
Mazarin's, 103, 104
new in 1539, 39
Renaissance, 72-73
Roannez, due de, 43
vogue of, 42
Caffieri, Filippo, Italian artist,

104
Camocas,* a fine silk, generally
imported from the Far East,
and highly prized in the Mid-
dle Ages, 27
Canape, 138

Canaux,* vertical flutings form-
ing a frieze somewhat like a
frieze of triglyphs, 49
Candelahrc, a Renaissance
motive, baluster-shaped and
greatly elongated, 46
Cane, for seats, 144
Cantonnieres,* part of the hang-
ings of a four-post bed, the
strip falling down the outside
of the post covering the open
ing between the curtains, I06~

149

15°

INDEX-GLOSSARY

Caquetoire, 79, 80, 81, 134
Carreaux, flat cushions, 85
Carving, Burgundian, 59, 60

in wood, 59-61

under Louis XIII, 91, 92,
99, 108
Cerceau, du. See Androuet
Certosina, Italian inlaying in
wood with little geometrical
designs, 15
Chair backs, 78, 79

a vertugadin, 79, 81, 82

arms, 78, 79

caned, 144

straw, 144, 145 :, ,
Chaire or chaiere, 26 , ^ ^f

« ferns, 77, 80, 84,85, 133, 134

iifemines,7y

de salle, Yl

later, 76

under Frangois I, 49

Chambord, 48

de Champaigne, Philippe,
painter, 90, 91, 145

Chute, decorative motive, 5 1

Claire-voie, II 27

Cluny Museum, 10, 45, 132, 141

Coffer, a bahut, 18
decoration, 8, 9
in Cluny Museum, 10
in 17th century, 1 1 8- 1 19
marriage (corbeille), 1 18
panelled sides, 7
pre-eminence of, 16, 17
slow to disappear, 42
solid walls, 6
the, 6
varieties of, 16, 17, 18

Consoles d'accotoirs, 136

Coquille, decorative motive, 52,
109

Corrozet, Gilles, author of poem
describing a house and its
equipment in 1539, 32

a Coulombes, bench, 4

Credence, 7 1

Cucci, Domenico, Italian artist,
104

Cupboards, 19

Louis XIII, 121-128
perfection of, in 1 6th cen-
tury, 42
" Protestant," 124
Renaissance, 67
varieties of, 68, 69

" Damoyselles," 4
" Demoiselles a atourner" 4
Diamond point, moulding, I15
vogue in Gascony, 1 17
vogue in Guienne, 1 17
Dressoir, See btiffet

Eagle, decorative motive, 63,

no
Eagle's foot, decorative motive,

no
Ebony, 15, 99
Ecriteaux, 52
Emmeitblement, set of hangings

and covers for bed, chairs, etc.,

all to match, 141
Enrichissement, decoration, 52
Entrelacs, decorative motive, 52,

109
Escabeau, 26, 82, 83
Escabelle, 82, 83, 137
a dos, 137

Faudesteuil, 24

Fauteuil, 133-135
Flamboyant style, 46
Fontainebleau, 54
Forme, 26, 82, 83
Francois I, his bed, with mother
of pearl marquetry, 40
period of, 47-54
Furetiere, his dictionary, 71, 80

Gable,* a very pointed species
of pediment over doors and
windows in the Gothic style, 12

Gaillon, chateau de, 41, 53

Garniture for chairs, 83-85, 138-
143

Gellee, Claude, painter, 90

INDEX-GLOSSARY

'5

German cabinets, so-called, lOO
Giacetti, Luigi, Italian lapidary
in the service of Louis XIV, 104
Golle, Pierre, Dutch cabinet-
maker, 105
Gothic masterpieces, 45
Goujon, Jean, sculptor, 55
Gouttieres, part of bed hangings,

23
Grotesques, 46, 47, 51

Henri III, period of, 43, 47, 64
Henri IV, style, so called, 89
Hcurtoirs cie layettes, drawer

handles, 56
Huchc, synonym for coffre''
Huchiers-menuisiers, guild of, 8,

14

Ile-de-France, furniture in,

58,60,
Intarsia, 40
Ironwork, 21, 44
Italian influence, lOI, 102
Italian ornament, 45, 46

Kraus, Hans, marqueteur to
Henri III, 40

Lapidaries, Italian, 104
Layette-coulisse, 21
Leather for chairs, 139

goat-skin, 139
Lcctrin, 22, 23
Louis XIII, period of, 89-96, 107-

T ^^

Louvre, artists lodged in, 97, 98

Lozenge, 51

Mace or Mass6, Jean, loi

Malic, 17

Marquetry, loi

Mascaron, 51

Mazarin, a bed belonging to, 106

cabinets belonging to, 103,
104, 105-106

his collection. 102

Medaille,* decorative medallion
with a head carved in bas-
relief, 33, 36, 47, 53
de Medici, Catherine, Florentine
tables, 43
her cabinet, 42
Migliorini, Ferdinando and
Orazio, Italian lapidaries in
the service of Louis XIV, 104
Monpensier, Mme. de, her

Memoirs quoted, II9
Motives, early, 11-14

for embroidery and needle

work, 142, 143
gothic, 45-46
grotesques, 46
Italian, 46
Renaissance, 50-54
under Louis XIII, 109-IIO
Mollet,* very short fringe, 143
Mouchettes, 12, 45
Mouldings, 112-117
in Burgundy, II 7
Louis XIII, 113
Louis XIV, 113
pointe de diamant, II5
pointes de gateau, II6
Renaissance, II3
tas de sable, II6
Muflc de lion, decorative motive,
63

LE Nain, brothers, painters, 91

"Orbevoie," 11,27
d'Orleans, Girard, painter and

decorator, 13
Oval, decorative motive, 52, 109

PANTALEONE,GiovanniMichele,

marqueteur to Francois I, 40
Parchemin replie or serviette,

"linenfold " decoration, 13
le Paultre, Jean, designer, 63, 109
Pente,* a strip of stuff hanging

down around the tester of a

bed, 106
Pilaster, 50, 55

15^ INDEX-GLOSSARY

Placet, 25, 82, 83
Plume decorative motive, 63, 109
Pointes dc gateau, moulding, II6
Polychromy in decoration, 12,44

dying out, 39 •
Pomme, turned motive, 112
Poussin, artist, 90
Provincial schools of joinery,

58-63
Putto,* child's face, an Italian

decorative motive

Renaissance decoration, 50-54
Rest bed, 137, 138

Saint Eustache, typical Re-
naissance church, 48
Saint-Germain, 54
Sambin, Hugues, huchier, 60, 61
Sauval, his Antiquites de la ville

de Paris quoted, 95, 96
Selle, 4, 26, 82, 83
Sendal, silk, a kind of thick

taffeta, highly esteemed in the

Middle Ages, 27
Serviette or parchemin replie,

13,27
Soubassement,* the valance

round a bed hanging down to

the floor, 106
Souffle ts, 12, 45
Stipo, Italian name for a cabinet,

104

Straw, for chairs, 144, 145
Stylobates, bases of pillars, 56
le Sueur, painter, 91

Tabouret, 82, 83
Tables, d'attente,* rectangular
panel mount to hold an in-
scription, 36
extending, 131
folding, 130, 131
general use, 22
Louis XIII, 75, 104, 105, 128-

131

mosaic, 104
pierres de Florence, 104
Renaissance, 36,40-42, 73-74,
transformation in 1 6th cen-'
tury, 41
Tas de sable, moulding, II6
Torus,* round convex moulding,

73
Toiipie, tamed motive, 112
Trevoux, his dictionary, 80
Tubeuf, the H6tel, 95, 96
Turnery under Louis XIII, IIO-
112
en balustre, III
en chapelet, IIO

Under-cupboards, 127

Vegetables, noble or ignoble,
as decorative motives, 48

? '>-.--

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