o longer bronze
mounts, in rosettes, garlands and bow-knots, elaborate inlaying, nor
painted furniture with lovely flowering surfaces; in the most severe
examples not even fluted legs! Instead, simple but delicately
proportioned furniture with slender, squarely cut, chastely tapering
legs, arms and backs, was the fashion. In fact, the Directoire type is
one of ideal proportions, graceful outlines with a flowing movement
and the decoration when present, kept well within bounds, entirely
subservient to the main structural material. One feels an almost
Quaker-like quality about the Directoire, whether of natural wood or
plain painted surface.

With Napoleon's assumption of regal power and habits, we get the
Empire (he had been to Rome and Egypt), pseudo-classic in outline and
richly ornamented with mounts in ormoulu characteristic of the Louis.

The Empire period in furniture was dethroned by the succeeding regime.

When we see old French chairs with leather seats and backs, sometimes
embossed, in the Portuguese style, with small regular design, put on
with heavy nails and twisted or straight stretchers (pieces of wood
extending between legs of chairs), we know that they belong to the
time of Henry IV or Louis XIII. Some of the large chairs show the
shell design in their broad, elaborate stretchers.

The beautiful small side tables of the Louis and First Empire called
consoles, were made for the display of their marvellously wrought
pieces of silver, hammered and chiselled by hand,--"museum pieces,"
indeed, and lucky is the collector who chances upon any specimen
adrift.

CHAPTER XIX

THE PERIODS OF THE THREE LOUIS

The only way to learn how to distinguish the three _Louis_ is to study
these periods in collections of furniture and objects of art, or,
where this is impossible, to go through books showing interiors of
those periods. In this way one learns to visualise the salient
features of any period and gradually to acquire a _feeling_ for them,
that subtle sense which is not dependent wholly upon outline,
decoration, nor colour, but upon the combined result.

French writers who specialise along the lines of interior decoration
often refer to the three types as follows:

Period of Louis XIV--heavily, stolidly masculine;

Period of Louis XV--coquettishly feminine;

Period of Louis XVI--lightly, alertly masculine.

One soon sees why, for Louis XIV furniture does suggest masculinity
by its weight and