In reply we have the following protest: “It was necessary to find another kind of architecture in which every worker could distinguish himself and bring that kind of skill within the reach of everybody; nevertheless, accepted tastes should not be rudely shocked by the sudden production of novelties too remote from the reigning taste, thereby risking a hissing. At first the famous Oppenord served us zealously.... He made lavish use of our favourite ornaments and brought them into favour. Even now he is useful to us, and there are some of us who take him as a model.... We found a stronger support in the talents of the great Meissonier. It is true that the latter had studied in Italy, and consequently was not one of us, but as he had wisely preferred the taste of Boromini to the wearisome antique taste, he had thereby come closer to us; for Boromini rendered the same service to Italy that we have to France, by introducing there an architecture gay and independent of all those rules that anciently were called good taste. Meissonier began by destroying all the straight lines that were used of old; he curved the cornices and made them bulge in every way; he curved them above and below, before and behind, gave curves to all, even to the mouldings that seemed least susceptible of them; he invented contrasts;—that is to say, he banished symmetry, and made no two sides of the panels alike. On the contrary, these two sides seem to be trying which could deviate most, and most oddly, from the straight line that till then they had been subject to.”
As Oppenord may be said to have presided at the opening of the Regency style, so Meissonier inaugurated that of Louis XV. His _rocaille_ escaped the exaggerations of the contemporary foreign masters, and kept within the bounds of good taste.
Among other decorators, less inventive but of charming taste, who followed in the traces of Meissonier were Michel, René Stoldz or La Joüe, Chevillon, etc. The Print Room of the _Bibliothèque Nationale_ possesses a collection of the beautiful designs of the two last-named artists in water-colour and _gouache_. These designers used many of the same motives as Meissonier, the shell, the cabbage-leaf, the shrimp (of course, the forms derived from these objects), but they added to their decorations still more fleeting and vague elements, such as falling water, the ostrich plume, etc. La Joüe is a real past master in the art of introducing into a decorative panel a cascade which sometimes falls from nowhere and loses itself in pearly foam: for him everything serves as a pretext for a cascade: neighing horses plunging in the water, an open-jawed dragon clinging to the base of a column, a hunted stag vomiting a jet of water into a fount whose marble rim is full of twists and contortions.