After this rapid review of the extraordinarily prolific foreign output, and the raids made on France by it from every side, the danger of being swamped run by French individuality will readily be understood. Those, indeed, whose talent or preponderating influence ought to have made them the right persons to defend it were the first unconsciously to betray it. Martellange of Lyons, endowed alike with talent and with wealth, devoted all his energies, as we have seen, to disseminating yet more widely depraved Italian taste. Henri IV. was, it is true, inspired with the noble and fitting ambition of protecting art at his own Court, for, as he wrote in 1608, "amongst the infinite blessings resulting from peace, that of the cultivation of the arts, which always flourish through its influence, is by no means the least." But who was the first to whom he offered hospitality? A Fleming, Laurent Stabre. Louis XIII. inherited the ideas and tastes of his father. During his reign a kind of Babel prevailed in the long galerie of the Louvre, in which were to be heard all the dialects of Europe, and where French artists were permeated with foreign influence.

Richelieu, keen-sighted though he generally was, shared the ideas of his sovereign, and had a mosaic table made at Florence, which is now in the Louvre Museum, was valued by La Fontaine at the exaggerated price of nine hundred thousand livres, and in which the revolutionary delegate Guitton-Morvaux pretended in 1794 that he recognised the precious stones filched from the shrines of the Abbey of St. Denis. Under Richelieu, and, subsequently, under Mazarin, the palace was filled with Italian productions. The latter installed in it the Dutch ebenist Pieter Golle, or Goller, and got the King to take into his service his own fellow countrymen Domenico Cucci, Filippo Caffieri, Francesco Bordoni, Fernando and Horatio Migliorini, Luigi Giacetti, Branchi, and others.

It really seemed at this moment as if the fires of French art, lit perhaps a thousand years before, were about to be extinguished a second time by the Latin genius ! But this was not to be. National taste survived; slowly but rationally it was re-evolved, modifying without any sudden or inharmonious transitions the fashions of ancestral times, and at the same time selecting and assimilating the best of the novel ideas presented to it. It is modest, but irresistible, for it has the majority on its side. It reflects the feelings of millions of humble souls, bound by family ties, who honour the memory of their fathers, and who, owning few things of value, give all the more affection to their unpretending furniture.

A certain man who lived at this time constituted himself the recorder of the fashions that prevailed in French homes, and that in a style most interesting from our point of view, for he chose engraving instead of writing as his medium of expression. His name was Abraham Bosse; he was the son of a merchant of Tours, and he was a member of the Calvinist sect, practising his religion, however, without prudery, if we may judge him by the Gallic humour characterising his engravings in the style of Jacques Callot and his pupil Jean de Saint-Igny. The earliest of these engravings were published in 1622, and were succeeded during some forty years by numerous series, under various titles, such as the "Jardin de la noblesse francaise," "Figures au naturel tant des vetements que des postures des gardes francaises du Roi tres Chretien," "Manage a la Ville," "Mariage a la Campagne," "L'enfant prodigue," "Lazare et le mauvais riche," "Les vierges sages et les vierges folles," "Cris de Paris, Metiers," "Galeries du Palais," "Œuvres de Charite," etc.

Even the plates illustrating Biblical scenes are little pictures of life in the seventeenth century, taken direct from nature with a truthfulness and simplicity recalling the work of the Dutchmen Vermeer, Terborch, or Van Ostade. The men are seen going about in doublets, with shoulder knots and full trunk hose, the women in very wide petticoats and low bodices, even in the gardens adorned with summer-houses, rock-work grottoes, and trees trimmed into pyramids, as well as in rooms betraying more or less clearly a certain reminiscence of the Henri II. style. Although we see that this sort of decoration became more complicated in those specimens of aristocratic furniture - now preserved in museums - which were made under Louis XIII., it was, on the contrary, greatly simplified by the taste of the bourgeoisie. The ever-increasing rarity of those good carvers on wood who had been supplanted by workers in mosaic and marquetry in the Italian manner made it the more necessary, if the old forms were not to be given up, to have recourse to turners. The complicated system of columns upholding the square tables of Du Cerceau were replaced by spiral supports.

It was much the same with ordinary chairs and armchairs, the chisel was only used on the top and posts of the dossier and on the most important of the rails, sometimes not even on them. Now for the first time the seat is to a certain extent comfortable, the beautiful carvings in relief that made it impossible to rest the shoulders have disappeared, as have also the movable cushions, which were quite insufficient to mitigate the hardness of the wood. Henceforth the seats are covered with cane, cloth, or stuffed leather, firmly fastened on to the structure. Moreover, the whole room is draped and the new woodwork disguised, as it has no longer a decorative object, with curtains and carpets. Some of Bosse's engravings represent comfortable rooms in which the bed and the table appear merely as two irregular cubes, so closely are they covered over down to the very ground. The bed from the Chateau of Effiat in the Cluny Museum gives something of the impression of a miniature apartment within a room. This fancy led to the evolution of the alcove, a regular wardrobe-like room, the only open side of which was sometimes provided with actual doors, traces of which remain in most French houses that are more than a hundred years old.