But who does not know the marvels of that fair land of tapestry, as one of our poets calls it, a fantastic, smiling land, wherein our youthful imaginations saw and dreamed of so many wondrous things?
Monsieur de Bois-Doré's hangings were put together with marvellous skill, in the sense that several adventures were successfully combined in a single one, by the agency of distant groups scattered over the landscape, and the honest nobleman had the pleasure of viewing all the scenes of his favorite poem while making the circuit of his apartment. But there were the most absurd drawings and the most impossible combinations of colors that one can imagine, and there could have been no better exemplification of the wretched taste, false and insipid, which in those days was found side by side with Rubens's magnificent work and the bold and lifelike drawings of Callot.
Every epoch runs thus to extremes; that is why we need never despair of the one in which we live.
We must recognize the fact, however, that certain periods of the history of art are more favored than others, and that there are some periods whereof the taste is so pure and so fruitful, that the sentiment of the beautiful finds its way into all the details of everyday life and into all the strata of society.
When the Renaissance is at its height everything assumes a character of refined originality, and one feels, even in the most trivial details, that the excitements of social life have marvellously quickened the flight of the imagination. The imaginative instinct descends from the region of lofty intellects to the humble artisan; from the palace to the hovel, nothing can accustom the eye and the mind to the sight of the ugly and the trivial.
It had already ceased to be so under Louis XIII., and the provincials in the neighborhood preferred Monsieur de Bois-Doré's modern tapestries and furniture to the valuable specimens of the style of the last century, which the reiters had pillaged or broken in his father's château fifty years before.
As for the marquis, who considered himself artistic, he did not regret those antiquities, and whenever he could pick up some landscape-dauber on the highway, he would bid him sketch before his eyes what he artlessly called his ideas, in the way of furniture and decorations, and would then have them manufactured at great expense, for he shrank from no outlay to gratify his mania for tawdry and eccentric splendor.
Thus the château was filled to overflowing with buffets with secret compartments and curious cabinets,—those wonderful cabinets, like great boxes with drawers, where the pressure of a spring causes an enchanted palace in miniature to appear, supported by twisted pillars, incrusted with enormous false precious stones, and occupied by diminutive figures in lapis-lazuli, ivory or jasper.
Other cabinets, sheathed in transparent shell over a red ground, with gleaming copper ornaments in relief, or all inlaid with carved ivory, contained some marvellous toy, of which the ingenious and mystery-laden mechanism served to conceal billets-doux, portraits, locks of hair, rings, flowers and other love-relics dear to the beaux of the period.
Bois-Doré hinted that those specimens of the cabinet-maker's art were stuffed with treasures of that sort; some evil-minded scoffers declared that they were empty.