Really, simplicity and reticence were the last things she considered,
but the point is that they were considered at all in such a restless,
passionate age. Later, in 1522, she established the _Paradiso_, a suite
of apartments which she occupied after her husband's death. So you see
the idea of a woman planning her own apartment is pretty old, after all.

The next woman who took a stand that revealed genuine social
consciousness was that half-French, half-Italian woman, Catherine de
Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet. She seceded from court because the
court was swaggering and hurly-burly, with florid Marie-de-Medicis at
its head. And with this recession, she began to express in her conduct,
her feeling, her conversation, and, finally, in her house, her awakened
consciousness of beauty and reserve, of simplicity and suitability.

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.