The three pieces shown in Figure 78 are pure types of Louis XVI. style. They are at the Cooper Institute, New York. The chair on the right has its original embroidered cover, and the straight carved leg so much in evidence. All three pieces are entirely gilt wherever the woodwork shows. The top of the table is marble. The chair to the left is very prettily carved with a torch and bow and arrows, according to the conceit of the times, when everything was to be joyous and gay, all suffering and sorrow being resolutely thrust out of sight. Rose, blue, and gold were the colours affected, nothing sombre being allowed. The whole life was careless and without responsibility. The letters of the day, Saint-Beuve, Comte de Tilly, Duc de Lauzun, and Madam d'Oberkirk, draw graphic pictures of the life of pleasure. The Duc de Lauzun says that one of his mother's lackeys, who could read and write tolerably well, was made his tutor.
"They gave me the most fashionable teachers besides, but M. Roche (the tutor) was not qualified to arrange their lessons, nor to qualify me to benefit by them. I was, moreover, like all the children of my age and station, dressed in the handsomest clothes to go out, and naked and dying with hunger in the house."
This was not through unkindness, but because of dissipation and carelessness, all the time and attention being given elsewhere. Even in the last days of the _ancien régime_ little boys had their hair powdered and dressed in ringlets and curls. They wore a sword, carried a chapeau under the arm, wore laces and frills, and coats with cuffs heavy with gold lace. The small girls were their mothers in miniature. At six one of them would present her hand for a little dandy to kiss, her little figure would be squeezed into a stiff corset, her huge hoop-skirt supported a skirt of brocade enwreathed with garlands of flowers. On her head was a structure of false curls, puffs, knots, and ribbons, held on by pins and topped with plumes; and if she was pale they would put rouge on her face. By force of habit and instruction she bore herself like a mature woman. Her most important instructor was the dancing-master, her never-ending study deportment.
In the eighteenth century drawing-room women were queens. They prescribed the law and fashion in all things. There was no situation, however delicate, that they did not save through tact and politeness. This was the time when first Watteau, and later Lancret and Fragonard, painted the _Fêtes galantes_, when pretty picnics and dancing in a woody dell were great diversions. It was an idealized life of the brilliant world of France which early in the eighteenth century Watteau painted. Scattered all through the land were sumptuous dwellings of the rich, upon which fortunes were lavished. Beaus and belles alike dressed themselves _à la Watteau_. He became the lover's poet, a painter of an ideal pastoral which hardly existed, but to which his hand gave beauty and value. This was one side. On the other, besides heavy taxation, poor crops, flood, famine, and the devastation of war, there was always the pest. This terrible contagious fever, with the smallpox, was a scourge to the people. Hundreds fell victims to these twin plagues, for the usual treatment was copious bleeding.