ch that their names are scarce known in connexion with the art they
vivified.

The aged Louis was ending his forceful reign in increasing weakness,
deserted at the finish by all but the rigid de Maintenon; and
four-year-old Louis, the grandson of the Grand Dauphin, was succeeding
under the direction of the Regent of Orleans. New monarchs, new
styles, the rule was; for the newly-crowned must have his waves of
flattery curling about the foot of the throne. Louis XIV, the Grand
Monarque, lived to his pose of heavy magnificence even in the
furnishing and decorating of the apartments where he ruled as king and
where he lived as man. Sumptuous splendour, expressed in heavy design,
in deep colouring, with much red and gold, these were the order of the
day, and best expressed the reign.

But with Philip as regent, and the young king but a baby, a gayer mood
must creep into the articles of beauty with which man self-indulgently
decorates his surroundings. Pomp of a heavy sort had no place in the
regent's heart. He saw life lightly, and liked to foster the belief
that a man might make of it a pretty play.

Thus, given so good excuse for a new school of decoration, Claude
Audran snatched up his talented brush and put down his dainty
inspirations with unfaltering delicacy of touch. He wrote upon his
canvas poems in life, symphonies in colour, created a whole world of
tasteful fancy, a world whose entire intent was to please. He left the
heavy ways of pomp and revelled in a world where roses bloom and
ribbons flutter, where clouds are strong to support the svelte deity
upon them, and where the rudest architecture is but an airy trellis.

The classic, the Greek, he never forgot. It was ever his inspiration,
his alphabet with which he wrote the spirit of his composition, but it
was a classic thought played upon with the most talented of
variations. Pure Greek was too cold and chaste for the temper of the
time in which he lived and worked and of which he was the creature;
and so his classic foundation was graced with curves, with colour,
with artful abandon, and all the charming fripperies of one of the
most exquisite periods of decoration. Gods and goddesses were a
necessary part of such compositions, and a continual playing among
amorini, but such deities lived not upon Olympus, nor anywhere outside
France of the Eighteenth Century. The heavy human forms made popular
by the inflation of the Seventeenth Century were banished to so