In England the 'mode ' was less extravagant, and ever-cheapening marqueterie ultimately became far more common than painted white wood; but such was the taste which linked Louis Quinze exuberance with the Empire asceticism, and which accompanied the mock-pastoral fashions of milkmaid-hats and aprons, golden crooks, Corydons and Chloes, which did not only exist in Mme. D'Aulnoy's stories, but were seen in society. The faint colouring of porcelain entered into dress, which bore the same stamp of would-be simplicity and innocence. Baby patterns, lilac dotted muslins, thin faint silks and nainsooks marked the inevitable reaction from the previous brilliance and heat of colour, and heralded in the pseudo-classic parodies: but the change had as yet no moral significance - vice na d become decent perhaps, but was not yet virtue.

There is grace in the idealism of this time, like an elegant drama, which made as though the art-reformation signified cleansed conditions; but we are not taken in by it, whether the eighteenth-century people were or were not. They 'made believe very much,' like Dickens's Marchioness - so much that they may have come to mistake the shadow for the substance, and really forgot that whilst they were mincing about rooms gay as a garden with flowers more fragile than their prototypes, whilst they were sleeping like Mme. Recamier in beds hung with the rarest Point d'Alencon, and so tired of idleness that dolls had to be made and guests stripped to furnish gold lace for their craze for untwisting1 - whilst one-half of France was lapped in useless luxury, the other half was starving.

The shepherds and shepherdesses in delicate rainbow garb meant no real simplicity and rural innocence: affectation is most corrupt and self-conscious when it begins to simulate purity with such, strenuous efforts. The sweet Greuze heads which smiled down on the shepherds implied no fact of human experience, hardly even an attainable ideal, but a cynical admission that childhood itself was not what it seemed. It matters not: let us eat and drink, to-morrow we die, was the moral of it all. Why else, how else, could Greuze have painted La Cruche Casscel Never was a face more sweet, more mystic, but Greuze preached no ideal state, no appeal to worth, to love or to pity, but wrought in a mood which strikes an English mind like a sick fancy, none the healthier for being a pretty one, at any rate peculiarly French: the 'pearl' in the fish.

1 Untwisting - 'the fashionable 'rage,' during which ladies scarcely stirred without .two.little work-bags, one filled with gold fringes, tasstls, or any golden trumpery they could obtain, the other to contain the gold they unravelled, which they sold to the Jews. 'The Due de Coigny one night appeared in a new and most expensive coat; suddenly a lady in the company remarked that its gold bindings would be excellent for untwisting. In an instant he was surrounded; in short, in a few moments the coat was stripped of its lace, its galloons, its tassels, its fringes.' - Illuminated Book of Needlework, p. 388.

The earthquake which should have come in Louis Quinze's time, overwhelmed Louis Seize and Marie Antoinette. It is difficult to read of the miseries of the downtrodden peasants without feeling that even the bloody Revolution was a divine retribution for offences that blackened earth: it is difficult to read of the meanness of cruelty which tortured the Royal Family in their misfortunes without indignantly realising that the blow fell on the wrong people. Debarred from pen and ink, toilet necessaries, even the scissors and knitting needles which might have beguiled the weary prison hours, the Capets were crowned martyrs by their sufferings. ' At this time the king's coat became ragged, and as the Princess Elizabeth his sister was mending it, as she had no scissors the king observed that she had to bite off the thread with her teeth. "What a reverse!" said the king, looking tenderly upon her; "you were in want of nothing at your pretty house at Montreuil." "Ah! brother," she replied, "can I feel regret of any kind while I share your misfortunes?" '