This was the early Seventeenth Century, mind you, when the main salons of the French houses were filled with such institutions as rows of red chairs and boxed state beds.  She undertook, first of all, to have a light and gracefully curving stairway leading to her salon instead of supplanting it.  She grouped her rooms with a lovely diversity of size and purpose, whereas before they had been vast, stately halls with cubbies hardby for sleeping.  She gave the bedroom its alcove, boudoir, ante-chamber, and even its bath, and then as decorator she supplanted the old feudal yellow and red with her famous silver-blue.  She covered blue chairs with silver bullion.  She fashioned long, tenderly colored curtains of novel shades.  Reticence was always in evidence, but it was the reticence of elegance.  It was through Madame de Rambouillet that the armchair received its final distribution of yielding parts, and began to express the comfort of soft padded backward slope, of width and warmth and color.

It was all very heavy, very grave, very angular, this Hotel Rambouillet, but it was devised for and consecrated to conversation, considered a new form of privilege!  The precieuses in their later jargon called chairs “the indispensables of conversation.”

I have been at some length to give a picture of Madame de Rambouillet’s hotel because it really is the earliest modern house.  There, where the society that frequented it was analyzing its soul in dialogue and long platonic discussion that would seem stark enough to us, the word which it invented for itself was urbanite—­the coinage of one of its own foremost figures.

It is unprofitable to follow on into the grandeurs of Louis XIV, if one hopes to find an advance there in truth-telling architecture.  At the end of that splendid official success the squalor of Versailles was unspeakable, its stenches unbearable.  In spite of its size the Palace was known as the most comfortless house in Europe.  After the death of its owner society, in a fit of madness, plunged into the rocaille.  When the restlessness of Louis XV could no longer find moorings in this brilliancy, there came into being little houses called folies, garden hermitages for the privileged.  Here we find Madame de Pompadour in calicoes, in a wild garden, bare-foot, playing as a milkmaid, or seated in a little gray-white interior with painted wooden furniture, having her supper on an earthen-ware service that has replaced old silver and gold.  Amorous alcoves lost their painted Loves and took on gray and white decorations.  The casinos of little comediennes did not glitter any more.  English sentiment began to bedim Gallic eyes, and so what we know as the Louis XVI style was born.