orkmen, who immediately began
making not only dinner-sets and ordinary dishes but all sorts of
fantastic and beautiful things. They fashioned colored statuettes,
vases of fanciful pattern, and an abundance of most exquisitely
modeled flowers. How such fragile products as these latter could be
fired without injury was a marvel. Among other presents which the
china-makers gave to the Queen was a vase three feet in height
containing a bouquet of four hundred and eighty of these flowers, each
one carefully copied from nature. These china flowers promptly became
the rage. Two bouquets of them, each costing 3,000 livres, were made
for the King and the Dauphin; and these remain to this day in one of
the French museums. The work of this period all reflects the
nation-wide enthusiasm for these china flowers. Statuettes were made
with a central figure surrounded by them; there were shepherds and
shepherdesses seated beneath arbors or trellises covered with the
daintiest of vines and blossoms; figures of court ladies at whose feet
masses of lovely flowers seemed growing. You can see some of this work
in our own museums, and I am sure you will agree with me that it is
little short of miraculous. The Art Museum at Boston has three very
fine specimens of these early French ornaments, and there are others
to be found elsewhere."

"I am going to hunt some of them up when I go home to the city,"
affirmed Theo.

"That's right! See all you can of the beautiful things the past has
given us; you never will be sorry," declared Mr. Croyden. "Now you can
imagine with a background of such progress at china-making, what a
furore and transformation followed when kaolin was discovered. Pate
dure was far more desirable than pate tendre, for it was much less
breakable. The works at Vincennes where Sevres china really had its
birth were now moved to Sevres itself, where the art of
porcelain-making was gradually perfected. The plant was not far from
Versailles, where the Royal palace was, and the industry immediately
came under the control of the King.

"Then there was excitement indeed! Money was poured in lavishly that
the infant venture might have every chance to grow. The King ordered
beautiful gardens to be made about the factories, and not a week
passed that he and Madame de Pompadour did not visit the works
accompanied by a train of nobles and ladies of the Court. Madame de
Pompadour, herself something of an artist, often touched up the
de