BRITAIN AND FRANCE. l6TH TO l8TH CENTURY
in the good taste, particularly in exteriors", and the appartements of
Louis XIV's later years are of less spatial interests.
The most important development between 1700 and 1715 is
concerned with interior decoration. In the hands of one of Haidouin-
Mansart's chief executives, Jean Lepautre, it went more and more
delicate and sophisticated. Grandeur was replaced by finesse, high
relief by an exquisite play on the surface, and a virile deportment
by an almost effeminate grace. Thus during the last years of Louis
XIV's reign the atmosphere of the Rococo consolidated itself.
The Rococo is indeed of French origin, although we have in-
troduced it in this book first in its German, that is its extreme and
most brilliant spatial forms. The term Rococo is a pun, it seems,
from barocco, alluding to the passion for those strange rock-like or
shell-like formations which are typical of its ornament and have been
analysed apropos Bruchsal and Vierzehnheiligen. They appear
there in the fifties, but are a French invention of 1715-30—or
rather an invention made in France. For the leaders of the gener-
ation responsible for the step from Lepautre's thin grace to full-
blooded Rococo were without exception not properly French:
Watteau the painter was a Fleming, Gilles-Marie Oppenord (1672-
1742) was the son of a Dutch father, Juste-Aurele MeisSonier
(1695-1750) of Provencal stock and born at Turin, Toro has an
Italian name and lived in Provence, and Vasse was Proven$al too.
It is due to these architects and decorators that vigour re-entered
French decoration, that curves of Italian Baroque derivation made
their appearance once more, that ornament launched out into the
third dimension again, and that the fantastic, completely original
ornament of the rocaille was conceived. In exterior architecture less
can be observed of this development than in interiors. Oppenord's
and Meissoniers* designs for facades were not carried out. It is in
the planning and decoration of houses that the Rococo celebrates
its greatest triumphs. The Rococo is a style of the salon, the petit
appartetnent and of sophisticated living (pi. xc). Decoration is far
more graceful and as a rule considerably less vigorous than in
Germany, Mid planning is of an unprecedented subtlety.
One difficulty in the standard Parisian hotel plan which the
architects liked to face and overcome was, for instance, the fact that
the front towards the cour d'honneur and the back towards the garden
should both be symmetrical in themselves and even when they did not
lie on the same axis. Courtonne's H6tel de Matignon (fig. 92) shows
176