Never was such encouragement given to floral ornamentation. Gaston, Due d'Orleans, established hothouses in the Luxembourg, and at Blois a true botanic garden, for the sole purpose of supplying the needle with sweet tints and forms. With a strange craving for nature in that vortex of art, the garden was brought indoors in a thousand ways. Flowers were rather interpreted than copied from nature, as is fit and right; they sprouted in raised groups both on the garments of the courtly people, the sofas they lolled on and the walls they whispered by. The best artists were employed to paint, carve, broider, inlay, and engrave the rare flowers as they opened in due season, and to design from them the beautifully conventionalised wreaths which covered the sumptuous leathern walls, and which remain to us, here and there, the best result of this flower-worship: the finest of all 'backgrounds' for the supreme decoration of a room, humanity. I shall presently show that the scheme of a Louis XIV. room did not ignore the living folk.

As if gold and colour in profusion did not fully carry out the royal conceptions of brightness, mirrors were used for totally novel effects. Some of us don't like mirrors. Would-be teachers sneer at plate glass, and recommend us to cut them into little bits, or cover them with shelves for books and blue pots. Louis XIV. knew the value of glass. Lucas de Nehou, director of the glass factory near Cherbourg, received royal orders to excel the fine Venetian work, and he obeyed. That England already did so, we hear from Evelyn (1672), who saw at Greenwich 'glasse blown of finer mettal than that of Murano at Venice;' and at Lambeth ' huge vases of mettal as cleare, ponderous, and thick as chrystal, also looking-glasses far larger and better than any that come from Venice;' and Bishop Sp-rat, in his 'History of the Royal Society,' speaks of 'English Glasse, finer and more serviceable for microscopes and telescopes', than any foreign glass. This was a little in advance of France.

Presently the mirrors were enlarged, and superadded to by sections of glass, and glass inlayings, forming borders, pediments, pendants, attached by golden branches and hidden seams and delicate floral arabesques. I shall elsewhere speak of the paintings on mirrors.

Such luminous points of white light refreshed the eye amidst the storm of colour as a changing fountain does in some richly clad, glowing garden. They took, in fact, precisely that place in the scheme of colour. They reflected at unexpected angles the delicate wainscots, the lovely hangings, the tortoiseshell and silver cabinets, the voluptuous pictures, the slabs of porphyry and Florentine mosaic which covered the consoles, the whole wealth of gilded wood, bronze, and chasings, velvet coats, broidered trains, and women, most lovely of all.

Colour

Here was wealth of ideas, carried out with true artistic discrimination: no sparsely-furnished cells, refuge of paucity of thought - bare cold green or grey apartments without so much as a glass to reflect and double a pretty face if anything so pleasing gets in by accident. All the resources of wealth were pressed into the service of pleasure and refinement - more here, less there, as they were wanted, and all shone out in rooms of excellent construction and architecture giving upon views such as we all remember at Fontainebleau and Versailles.

What a rebuke to our fear of colour and brightness! like a loud sweet song which drowns the tentative minor of an Æolian harp. And the ghostly figures in our mind's eye, that wander through those vast luxurious saloons, were matches in brightness and softness and vivacity. A man in a modern evening dress sitting on an old Louis XIV. chair is an ungainly object, the harsh dull fabric and graceless lines ill befit so dainty a couch: a woman in a stuff gown and a plaid shawl looks equally horrible. But people the glittering rooms with rainbow dames and damoiseaux, in coats of amaranth velvet, or yellow and silver, with muffs and swords, and fluttering canions of riband and point d'AIencon of fairy lightness, trains of silk 'covered with more than a thousand yards of ribbon,' says Mme. D'Aulnoy, snow-white arms, bright eyes made brighter by patch and mask - and I. think we get the most dazzling picture of civilised skill and knowledge of effect, based on Nature herself, that can be found in the world's history - not excepting old Rome.

Fig. 34. - Doublet, about 1646, time of Louis Quatorze.

But the decline of taste which Louis XIV. had been able to stem, or at least make pretty, with the aid of men of immense ability, progressed with double speed when the king grew old, and the court inconceivably corrupt, and Boule's successors ministered to the vitiated eye.

It is remarkable to look through the innumerable 'Gayetes ' of Le Pautre, engraved about the middle of the seventeenth century, and see how no possible department of decoration was left unconsidered by the almost feverish industry of the artists so warmly encouraged. Le Pautre was but one of a host: he was pupil of Adam Phillippon, joiner and cabinet-maker and also designer: and he has left designs for buildings of all kinds, decorations without and within, of every sort; great vases in which invention seems at times delirious but always clever; carriages, alcoves, pulpits, trophies, mirrors, splendid ceilings; beds like shrines, and tents, and fonts; ornate galleys worthy of Cleopatra herself; suggestions for all kinds of workmen; gardens, fountains - he could not leave the very grass-plats alone, but must cover them with curious arabesques to be carried out in colour, vegetable or mineral. This elaborate completeness of conception gave no doubt a totally novel and constantly adaptable interest to constructions of all sorts, and we can understand how many enthusiasts may have thought they were cultivating the beautiful when they were only making artificiality a science.