[Illustration: Fig. 82.--Title-page engraved by Fessard after Cochin for the works of Madame Deshoulières, 1747.]
Nearly all the frontispieces of the Book with vignettes of the eighteenth century preserve this arrangement: an ornamented and draped border, with garlands of roses, symbols, and cupids, in the middle the title, in red and black, composed in open letter, often a scroll with the address of the publisher, but rarely a mark. It was the time of little winged cupids, goddesses, and gods. The goddesses were the favourites of the kings, Madame de Pompadour or the princesses, but rarely the virtuous Marie Leczinska, too homely and too much ignored to tempt the artists; the kings or the princes were the gods.
After Jombert, Prault, and Coustellier, Cochin worked for François Didot, syndic of the printers, for whom he prepared a set of illustrations to Molière. Unfortunately Didot died in 1757, and the project fell with him. Of the work of Cochin there only remains the set of _Tartufe_ etchings in octavo.
In the vortex into which he was plunged, he successively illustrated the works of Rousseau, published at Brussels, quarto; those of Boileau, published by David and Durand, octavo; and Henault's "History of France," in the same size, with numerous vignettes. One of these should be noted in a book treating of printing; it is that in which Cochin pretends to show to his contemporaries the interior of a workshop in 1470. Without doubt the sketch of this print was taken in one of the houses frequented by him--at Jombert's, Didot's, or David and Durand's--for that room in which compositors are working and printed sheets drying was not an invention of Cochin, and served to reproduce a printing office of the eighteenth century.
[Illustration: Fig. 83.--Vignette taken from P. Corneille's _Théâtre_, by Gravelot.]
With Cochin soon worked a number of designers and aqua-fortists, too prudent to lose the opportunity. The fashion arrived for books beribboned, festooned, and flowered. Hubert François Gravelot had carried to London this style of new works, which he knew how to decorate, in his manner, better than any one, with letters, figures, and tailpieces. He did not engrave much himself, leaving this work to lesser artists, and contenting himself with subtle invention and graceful subjects. With Eisen, Cochin, and Moreau, he is the French artist in the sense of the time, free, bold, and ingenious, but perhaps a little out of place in England. He published his plates to the "Decameron" in 1757, one of the most curious of his sets of plates, and a hundred various vignettes. On his return to France he designed the _Théâtre_ of P. Corneille, from which the _Galerie de Palais_ is here reproduced, on account of the illustration of bookselling which it gives. In 1764 the large _salon_ of the Palace was still, as in the time of Abraham Bosse, a place where shops were fitted up and the new books discussed. Side by side with the dressmakers and merchants of every category, the bookseller offers to his customer the recent products of Parisian presses. Certain works were sold under cover and not shown; there is here something to pique the curiosity of unoccupied young men who strolled about and prolonged their stay in the galleries.