The prevailing fashion under Marie Antoinette was refinement, avant tout, and if at times this redeemed style was open to the charge of affectation or insipidity, we must not be too censorious considering what preceded and what followed it.

After the lacquer craze, came the craze for porcelain. Louis Quinze had patriotically founded and made fashionable the porcelain manufactory of France, and even in his time porcelain had been put to novel use, but it was in the succeeding reign that the rage for it culminated, when the manufacture was in perfection and taste had overleapt the point of good sense.

Fig. 40. - Costume, time of Louis Seize (from a caricature, circ. 1786, entitled ' Modern elegance.')

Sevres plaques and Wedgwood cameos were the new 'gems' promoted to great honour; they were inserted in tables and cabinets, mounted in the most delicately chiselled brass or even gold, like personal ornaments, which last actually existed, and sat on every belle's fingers or white throat.

The Sevres plaques were a little in advance of the Wedgwood, which were difficult to procure out of England before 1790. Choice wavered between the glaze of the one and the morbidezza of the other. The tender Wedgwood colouring is delicate, but very cold; the Sevres is delicate without coldness, but it is too often inane. A whole drawing-room, however, furnished in Sevres china - tables, chandeliers, vases, statuettes - and Sevres colouring, presents a singularly elegant ensemble, which harmonises very sweetly with the grace of a refined and pretty presiding genius.

Figure to yourself, reader, such a room, shortly after the invention of the soft-paste porcelain; such a room as one of the boudoirs at Fontainebleau or Versailles, with its fine proportions, tall doors opening in the middle, white marble mantelpieces, and windows giving on carefully tended views. The room is an artificial garden. Every shelf that can bear a pot is laden with vases, whereon the rose Pompadour, the bleu turquoise and bleu de roi, the pale green called vert pomme, the soft jonquille and the ceil deperdrix follow one another like notes of a song written in opal tints of fruit and flower and bird.

Whole beds of flowers, made of porcelain (a special feature of the time), modelled and coloured, and - last extravagance! - perfumed au naturel, seem to grow and bloom on this side and that. Flowers of ormolu enclose calices for candles, and mirrors double the bouquets. Bronze stems, supporting foliage and dew-drops of rock crystal, form the chandeliers and girandoles which the utmost care and deftness can hardly keep clean. Here is a table of the new 'mahogany' wood, that might be the queen's own, around which.plaques of fragile porcelain are set amid bas-reliefs of metal of the utmost fineness. The legs (can we call them by so coarse a name?) are slight but elegantly proportioned, the small feet check with concentric rings the slim spirals just stout enough to bear the weight of the top - Japan lacquer framed in lace-like bronze, all too delicate to burden with anything heavier than a Sevres snuff-box - or one Sevres teacup - and the gently curving tray beneath, enclosing the golden semblance of a wicker basket. The classic element is present in the dainty bas-reliefs and the well-chased busts at the corners; but the result is not classic, it is only playing amorously at classicism.

How different is this cleverness from the earlier French translations from the grand antique! how much more trivial than the robust science of the sixteenth century ! Here is a clock, of course porcelain and gold, with the tenderest green and pink playing into each other; a Corinthian pillar supports an urn wreathed with roses, and two delicately modelled nudities support both. Everybody is debilitated, and requires support, but it should be polite, not obtrusive - in fact the hands need not touch, as long as they are ready. There hangs a picture of the Watteau school, pastoral, insipid, with its gentle insinuation; latet anguis in herba, however well-kempt the turf. An escritoire shows us a silver inkstand of the inevitable pattern, festoons of flowers and ribbons, but calm, not whirling like those in Louis XV.'s time. The escritoire wears similar ornaments, and its ormolu caryatides are works of firstrate skill. Here is a tazza,1 the basin painted outside in broad rays of bleu de roi and turquoise, inside with loves of surpassing grace that float on clouds and wreaths of roses, charmingly tinted; the whole mounted in minutely chiselled ormolu, describing a garland of tiny grapes and blossoms, sustained by boys with fishes' tails, half syrens, half cupids, modelled with ability and knowledge which would shame our silversmiths.

Fig. 41. - Table, time of Louis Seize.

The frames of the porcelain-trimmed chairs and sofas are no longer gold as in the previous reign. White paint, varnished and relieved by faint lines of lilac or blue in the delicate mouldings, echo, like the faint coloured carpet and silken walls, the colours of the china that encases everything, and for which the furniture has become a mere mount. All things revolve around this mock simple fashion, the dainty flutings, amorous trophies, and draped urns recalling the antique, piece, meal. Truly, here is lavishness and fastidiousness in excelsis; truly, 'good taste' is in its glory - but it is a glory of clay. In all this, says a clever French writer, 'we read a polished gallantry, and see the last smile of that society about to disappear in storm and bloodshed.' Some suppose that the cabinets, and vases of scented flowers were wholly made and completed in the Sevres manufactory when a special staff of experienced workmen were retained to prepare them for royal presents. A visit to Sevres to see the process of making even a small vase with the fine snow-white clay will give us some idea of the costliness of a fashion which covered, not only the court beauties but the chairs they sat on, with porcelain pictures painted by acknowledged artists in the severely protected royal manufactory: - nay, their very carriages were incrusted with them.

There was some reason then for agonies of fear for the panels, such as some ladies suffer in a new glossy carriage. Mme. Dubarry mentions the equipage of Mme. Beaupre: - 'Nous la vimes paraitre dans une voiture dont les panneaux etaient en porcelaine ornee de peintures delicieuses, les encadrements en cuivre surdore.' The subjects of the paintings were endless; some mythological, some from 'Don Quixote' and La Fontaine's fables: 'Temptation of St. Anthony,' 'Le Triomphe de la Beaute,' 'La Baigneuse aux roseaux,' and such like, the names of the artists being quoted.

1 In the author's possession.