e conclusion to
which one is forced in a study of the Beauvais factory.

Louis Hinart was the man appointed to construct the buildings and to
stock them, and the royal appropriation therefor, was 60,000 livres.
He was to engage a hundred workers for the first year, more to be
added; and special prizes were temptingly offered for workmen coming
from other countries, and to the contractor for each tapestry sold for
exportation.

[Illustration: HENRI IV BEFORE PARIS

Beauvais Tapestry, Seventeenth Century. Design by Vincent]

[Illustration: HENRI IV AND GABRIELLE D'ESTREES

Design by Vincent]

Thus was trade to be encouraged, and the venture put on its feet
commercially. But alas, the factory was not a success. Tapestries were
woven, hundreds of them, and they delight us now wherever we can find
them, whether low warp or high, whether large pieces with figures or
smaller pieces almost entirely verdure of an entrancing kind. But the
orders for large hangings, the heavy patronage from outside France,
was of the imagination only, and the verdures for home consumption did
not meet the expenses of the factory. After twenty years of struggle,
Hinart was completely ruined and ceded the direction of the factory to
a Fleming of Tournai, Philip Behagle. As most of the workers were
Flemish, this was probably not disagreeable to them.

Behagle, more energetic than Hinart, with a gift for initiative, set
the high-warp looms to work with extraordinary activity. As though he
would rival the great Gobelins itself, he reproduced the most
ambitious of pieces, the Raphael series, _Acts of the Apostles_, and a
long list of ponderous groups wherein oversized gods disport
themselves in a heavy setting of architecture and voluminous
draperies. He also produced some contemporary battle scenes which are
now in the royal collection of Sweden.

Not content with copying, Behagle set up a school of design in the
factory, realising that the base of all decorative art was design. Le
Pape was the artist set over it. From this grew many of the lovely
smaller patterns which have made the factory famous. Its garlands have
ever been inspired, and its work on borders is of exquisite conception
and execution.

It is considered a great fact in the history of the factory that the
king paid it a visit in 1686; that he paraded and rested his important
person under the shade of the living verdure in its garden. But it
seems more to the point