V

THE BOUDOIR

Table Bells

Carved Wood Watch-Stands

The Work Table

Silver Pomanders

Stuart Needlework

Ear-rings

CHAPTER V

THE BOUDOIR

Table Bells-Carved Wood Watch-Stands-The Work Table-Silver Pomanders-Stuart Needlework-Eag-rings.

IN fifteenth- and sixteenth-century days the guests at the upper end of the table above the salt withdrew to be out of earshot of their inferiors.

The "withdrawing room " has lingered through many variations, and has survived in the modern drawing room. At Hampton Court there was still the King's drawing room of the time of William and Mary, as well as audience chambers and dressing rooms, and the King's "writing closet." Anne had her "Drawing Room" at Hampton Court; another room there is still termed the Prince of Wales's Drawing Room, and there is the Queen's private Chamber, besides private dining rooms, ante-rooms and guard chambers, -these are the appointments of state apartments. In noblemen's houses the withdrawing room continued and still exists as well as parlours and great parlours. "For an ordinary gentleman,”

says Mortimer in 1750, in his Husbandry, hall, a great parlour, with a withdrawing room, with a kitchen, butteries, and other conveniences is sufficient."

Doctor Johnson defines the "parlour" as a room "in houses, on the first floor, elegantly furnished for reception or entertainment." He derives the word from parloir (French), a room in monasteries where the religious gathered together for conversation.

In a survey of some of the great mansions of England we find State Rooms, and White Parlours, and Velvet Rooms, Music Rooms, and at Chatsworth is a Sabine Room. Castle Howard has its High Saloon and its Sitting Room. Nostell Priory has its Tapestry Saloon as well as its Drawing Room and Dining Room. Houghton Hall has its Marble Parlour, and its White State Room and its White Drawing Room, its Embroidered Room and its Cabinet Room. Goodwood House has its Yellow Drawing Room and its Tapestry Dining Room. Wilton House has its Double Cube Room, and its Single Cube Room. Hatfield House has its Summer Drawing Room. Wroxton Abbey has its Garden Parlour. Wentworth Castle has Queen Anne's Sitting Room, and Welbeck Abbey has still its Red Withdrawing Room, of the closing years of the eighteenth century, and its Green Withdrawing Room.

This panorama of state rooms and great halls and long galleries suggests brilliant gatherings and

wonderful fêtes, when the world of fashion foregathered in these grand saloons or these parlours to hold converse upon matters of state, or love, or maybe to have a rubber at "whisk" as did Kitty, the famous Duchess of Queensberry, when on one famous Sunday night, she gave "a great card rout" which provoked a very English mob to break her windows and a great riot ensued. More homely was the environment of the Vicar of Wakefield, who says of his domestic happiness and simplicity, "there was, in fact, nothing that could make us angry with the world or each other. We had an elegant house, situated in a fine country and a good neighbourhood. We had no revolutions to fear, nor fatigues to undergo; all our adventures were by the fireside, and all our migrations from the blue bed to the brown."

The parlour and the sitting room were English, but the saloon was evidently derived from the French salon, which suggests society à la mode in varying phases from the conversations intime recounted in generations of memoirs from the days of Mademoiselle de Scudery to those of Madame Récamier. The parlour, as did the boudoir, came from the continent. The note of privacy was in the withdrawing room as it is in the boudoir. It may have been a reception room in which the state bed was a background behind colonnades, as in Dutch pictures. But in French prints, by Moreau le Jeune and others, the boudoir was undeniably a reception room.