FAUTEUIL—BERGÈRE—ARM-CHAIR—EPISCOPAL SEAT.

Last night we were playing a charade en action. As Madame Catalani, and her clever son, with some other foreigners, were of the party, we played it in French. I personated an antiquated ultra baronne, restored to her donjon in Normandy, and receiving a visit from an old châtelain of the neighbourhood, who came to congratulate her on the restoration of all old things. The scene we made of giving les honneurs du fauteuil to my neighbour, my horror at the indignity of offering a chaise de paille to an ancien noble of seven quarters; and the overthrow of the whole party, chairs and all, in the struggle of ceremony, occasioned a good deal of laughing. I borrowed the trait from a scene I had witnessed in the Faubourg, on my first arrival in Paris, when a great effort was making to restore the fauteuil to its ancient honours.

The history of arm-chairs would make an amusing volume, if given from antique times to the present, from the fauteuil of the middle ages, when it had reached its highest political importance, down to the modern dormeuse, in which, at this moment, I am scribbling, ex cathedra! What a specimen of the progress of society it would embrace—what state secrets it would reveal—what sanguinary wars—what treaties of peace, what family ties dissolved—what courses of true love turned aside—all owing to the important fauteuil!

“Armed-chairs—chairs with a back—the stool of honour—the right hand and the left,” says Voltaire, “have, for many ages, been the important objects of diplomacy, and the subjects of illustrious quarrels.” Buonaparte, whose weakness it was to adopt the worn-out étiquettes of an order of things directly opposed to his own existence, raised the fauteuil along with the altar and the throne; and it is said, that, when Madame Letitia Buonaparte made her visit of ceremony, on the accouchement of her imperial daughter-in-law, the arm-chair was removed from the room, lest she (being, as she was, roturière, though the mother of an emperor, four kings, and two or three princesses) might presume to usurp its honours in the presence of the daughter of the Cæsars, the descendant of the Hapsbourgs!

Alas, for the vicissitudes of human grandeur! There are those living, more roturière than the excellent Madame Buonaparte, who have since seated themselves on whatever chair they pleased, in the presence of the ex-Empress of France, the now obscure Duchess of Parma; who herself sat, confounded with other ladies, in the salon of an English peeress, obtaining no distinction, save what was conferred by the attention and courtesy of an English ambassadress. Oh! if the great would, or could, but feel how little they owe of the world’s homage to themselves, and how much to their position,—before some dreadful reverses teach them the sad truth, that they are but the signs of that power, which lies in principles, and not in persons.

The curule chair of the Romans had a certain respect attached to it, as being the seat of magistracy—very different, however, from the awe which is inspired by the sight of a throne in the hearts of the loyal idolaters of modern absolutism. The luxurious Romans, who, when not in activity, lay extended, even at their meals, on couches, seem not to have considered a mere seat in connexion with rank and power. The Fabiuses and Catos borrowed no distinction from the privilege of sitting in an arm chair. The form of the curule chair is preserved in the sculptured marble of some of the noble statues of antiquity, which are designed in the seated attitude. The ease of their position seems rather to result from the grace of the individuals represented, than from the commodity of the chair, which is low-backed and simple in form. Its substance, however, was ivory, richly carved—a curious fact in the history of the arts.

It was with the barbarous lower ages that the arm-chair first acquired its modern consequence, and it continued to increase in political importance down to the French revolution. The code of etiquettes concerning the fauteuil in old France, was a consecrated volume. To claim les honneurs du fauteuil, or to give them, determined the most knotty points of precedence which agitated dynasties, and disturbed the peace of kingdoms. The origin of this distinction lay very probably in the rarity of the object—in the rude unaccommodated and dreary stone towers, in which the ancestors of families of many quarters then sheltered their heads. The easy chair was reserved for the elder or chief of the family, who, in those patriarchal times, ruled with an iron despotism over his timid, but often unnatural offspring; for the son, who was not permitted to sit in the presence of his father, frequently usurped his dominions, and hurried him from his fauteuil to his grave. The filial history of the respectful and royal sons of Spain and Russia, is the epitome of the story of those times, when the fauteuil was the domestic throne of every tyrant châtelain, and the exclusive privilege of the great.

To know the full consequence attached to sitting in an arm-chair, the French memoirs must be deeply studied; particularly those, written in the simplicity of their hearts, by Dangeau and Mademoiselle Montpensier. The life of the “grande Mademoiselle” was one continued agony of quarrels on the subject of the fauteuil and the chaise à dos; and half the diplomacy of Europe in her time was occupied with discussions on similar subjects. Cardinal Richelieu, having refused to walk three steps beyond the door of his apartment—(he was willing to walk two)—to meet the English ambassador, who came to treat of the marriage of Charles the First with Henrietta of France, that marriage, of such importance to both crowns, was nearly broken off. The cardinal, however, affected sickness, and receiving the English duke in a chaise longue, thus avoided the odd step, without breaking off the alliance.

Louis the Thirteenth, desiring to hold a private council with his minister and master, Richelieu, was obliged to visit him in his bed-room, where he lay dangerously ill. But as a subject, though dying, could not be permitted to receive the king in bed, except the king was lying in bed also, Louis was wheeled in, on a chaise longue, and they both thus lay in state to discuss the affairs of the nation. Louis the Fourteenth observed the same form, when he went to visit the wounded hero Turenne.

In the olden times the easy chair, or chaise de doléance, was reserved for invalids, in the houses of the middle ranks of England and Germany; but the chair of “le roi Dagobert”⁠[55] if in existence, would have a chance of being discarded, even by the most zealous voltigeur, in favour of a modern dormeuse, with its easy fall, cushioned back, and pillows of iron, softer than down,—now at the disposition of every member of the family. In all that respects the comforts and commodity of life, the wisdom of our ancestors was confessedly at fault.

The two most interesting arm-chairs in existence, are the Shakspeare chair, late in the possession of Mrs. Garrick, and Voltaire’s chair, which stood beside the fire-place in the Hôtel de Vilette, Rue Vaugirard, when I last saw it, in 1820. The inauguration chairs of the O’Neals, the O’Donnels, and the O’Briens would form long items of antiquarian research in the chapter of arm-chairs, too long probably for the patience of the general reader.

So much for the social arm-chair,—the chaise à dos, and fauteuil of the court—the bergère and chaise à bras of the château. But the history of the chair of the church—the episcopal chair—with all its sedentary rites, connected with the divine offices and high privileges of its incumbent, is of far more importance. The where, and the how, the princes of the church should sit enthroned above their prostrate flock, became an object of ecclesiastical attention in the early ages of christianity; and scarcely had the primitive christians issued from the caves and obscure places whence so many divine things were given out, than councils were held, and canons established the sites, and positions, and materials of the easy seats of the bishops and clergy. Then came the absis, and the faldistorium, or chair of state, used for pontifical duties; and then the episcopal thrones and patriarchal and papal chairs of Rome, all symbols of worldly power and spiritual pride, alike the objects of ambition and contest, and claimed, and struggled, and fought for, like the poor mondaine fauteuil, by prince bishops, who, in the early ages, were proud of a wooden seat, but who in process of time occupied chairs elevated and gorgeous as regal thrones.

The ruins of the old episcopal throne in the famous cathedral of Rouen, which has flourished from the fourth century, are now forsaken for a magnificent and luxurious chair, or faldistorium. The history of the origin and progress of the bishop’s seat, as fixed in his church or cathedral, from the first Bishop of Canterbury, who humbly took his sedes lignea, to the last whom divine grace has called to fill its sumptuous throne,⁠[56] would in itself throw a strong light upon the history of the church of England. “Que de choses dans un menuet!” exclaimed a French dancing-master in an ecstacy at the mysteries he was teaching a royal pupil. Que de choses dans un fauteuil! One may write upon a fiddle-stick, doggedly, if not learnedly. One of the best things Swift ever did write, was on a broom-stick.