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The House in Good Taste
·
Elsie De Wolfe
7
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
Hôtel
Rambouillet,
but
it
was
devised
for
and
consecrated
to
conversation,
considered
a
new
form
of
privilege!
The
précieuses
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
hôtel
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
urbanité--the
coinage
of
one
of
its
own
foremost
figures.
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