on of ancient "toiles," but
because here is preserved the use of the high-warp loom, and the same
method of manufacture as in other and better times. A crowd of
interested folk drift in and out between the portals, survey the
Pavilion of Louis XIV and the court, the garden and the stream, then,
turning inside, the modern surveys the work of the ancient, the
remnants of time. And no less curious and no less remote do the old
tapestries seem than the atelier where the high looms rear their
cylinders and mute men play their colour harmonies on the warp. It
all seems of other times; it all seems dead. And it is a dead art.

[Illustration: GOBELINS TAPESTRY. LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Luxembourg, Paris]

[Illustration: GOBELINS TAPESTRY. LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Pantheon, Paris]

The tapestries on the looms are garish, crude, modern art in its
cheapest expression; or else they are brilliant-hued copies of
time-softened paintings that were never meant to be translated into
wool and silk.

The looms are always busy, nevertheless. There is always preserved a
staff of officers, the director, the chemist of dyes, and all that;
and the tapissiers are careful workmen, with perfection, not haste, in
view. The State directs the work, the State pays for it, the State
consumes the products. That is the Republic's way of continuing the
craft that was the serious pleasure of kings. But there is now no
personal element to give it the vital touch. There is no Gabrielle
d'Estrees, nor Henri IV; no Medici, no Louis XIV, no Pompadour. All is
impersonal, uninspired.

Men who have worked in the deadening influence of the Gobelins declare
that the factory cannot last much longer. But it is improbable that
France--Republican France, that holds with bourgeois tenacity to
aristocratic evidences--will abandon this, her expensive toy, her
inheritance of the time of kings.

In the time of the Second Empire it was the fashion to copy, at the
Gobelins, the portraits of celebrated personages executed by
Winterhalter. The exquisite portrait of the beautiful Empress Eugenie
by this delectable court painter has a delicacy and grace that is all
unhurt by contrast with more modern schools of painting. But fancy the
texture of the lovely flesh copied in the medium of woven threads, no
matter how delicately dyed and skilfully wrought. Painting is one art,
tapestry-making is entirely another.

But that is just where the fault lay and contin