Fig. 71a a.—Maiolica Vase, by Ginori.
CHAPTER VII.
FRENCH FAIENCE.—PALISSY WARE, AND HENRI-DEUX WARE.
Bernard Palissy.—The Catholics and the Huguenots.—Saintes.—Figurines.—The Centennial Exhibition.—Prices.—Henri-Deux—where made—when.—Copies at Philadelphia.—List of Pieces extant, and Prices.
BERNARD PALISSY.—Over the name and fame of Palissy hangs an aureola of glory. He was a potter, and he learned his trade through much perseverance and much suffering. But, more than that, he was a Protestant in the days of the Leaguers, when to be a Protestant in France meant to persecute or to be persecuted; and it meant also peril and probable death. Palissy was born about 1510, and died in 1590. He lived, therefore, through the times of the bitter and cruel wars of the Huguenots and the Catholics, when political and religious and social intrigues divided the nobility of France into factions, which were not only ready to, but did, rend each other’s throats. He lived—he, a Protestant—through the wholesale butcheries of St. Bartholomew (1572), when it is asserted that from twenty to one hundred thousand Protestants were slaughtered in the kingdom of France in cold blood.