names and personalities of men
and women who will always live in history as products of an age of
great culture and art.

PLATE XVIII

A delightful bit of a room. The furniture, in line, shows a
Directoire influence. The striped French satin sofa and one chair
is blue, yellow and faun, the Brussels tapestry in faded blues,
fauns and greys. Over a charmingly painted table is a Louis XV
gilt applique, the screen is dark in tone and has painted panels.

The rug, done in cross-stitch, black ground and design colours,
was discovered in a forgotten corner of a shop, its condition so
dingy from the dust of ages that only an expert would have
recognised its possibilities.

[Illustration: _Corner of a Drawing Room, Furniture Showing Directoire
influence_]

The Louis XIV, XV and XVI periods in furniture are all related. Rare
brocades, flowered and in stripes, bronze mounts as garlands,
bow-knots and rosettes, on intricate inlaying, mark their common
relationship. The story of these periods is that gradually decoration
becomes over-elaborated and in the end dominates the Greek outline.

The three Louis mark a succession of great periods. Louis XIV, though
beautiful at its best, is of the three the most ornate and is
characterised in its worst stage by the extremely bowed (cabriole)
legs of the furniture, ludicrously suggestive of certain debauched
courtiers who surrounded the _Grande Monarch_.

Louis XV legs show a curve, also, but no longer the stoggy, squat
cabriole of the over-fed gallant. Instead we are entranced by an
ethereal grace and lightness of movement in every line and decoration.
Here cabriole means but a courtly knee swiftly bending to salute some
beauty's hand. So subtly waving is the curving outline of this
furniture that one scarcely knows where it begins or ends, and it is
the same with the decorations--exquisitely delicate waving traceries
of vines and flora, gold on gold, inlay, or paint in delicate tones.
All this gives to the Louis XV period supremacy over Louis XVI, whose
round, grooved, tapering straight legs, one tires of more quickly,
although fine gold and lovely paint make this type winning and
beloved.

From Louis XVI we pass to the Directoire, when, following the
Revolution, the voice of the populace decried all ostentation and
everything savouring of the superfluous. The Great Napoleon in his
first period affected simplicity and there were n