Rheims for the use of Queen Joan of Burgundy was decorated with ‘thirteen hundred and twenty-one _papegauts_ (parrots) made in broidery and blazoned with the King’s arms, and five hundred and sixty-one butterflies, whose wings were similarly ornamented with the Queen’s arms—the whole worked in fine gold.’ Catherine de Medicis had a mourning-bed made for her ‘of black velvet embroidered with pearls and powdered with crescents and suns.’ Its curtains were of damask, ‘with leafy wreaths and garlands figured upon a gold and silver ground, and fringed along the edges with broideries of pearls,’ and it stood in a room hung with rows of the Queen’s devices in cut black velvet on cloth of silver. Louis XIV. had gold-embroidered caryatides fifteen feet high in his apartment. The state bed of Sobieski, King of Poland, was made of Smyrna gold brocade embroidered in turquoises and pearls, with verses from the Koran; its supports were of silver-gilt, beautifully chased and profusely set with enamelled and jewelled medallions. He had taken it from the Turkish camp before Vienna, and the standard of Mahomet had stood under it. The Duchess de la Ferté wore a dress of reddish-brown velvet, the skirt of which, adjusted in graceful folds, was held up by big butterflies made of Dresden china; the front was a _tablier_ of cloth of silver, upon which was embroidered an orchestra of musicians arranged in a pyramidal group, consisting of a series of six ranks of performers, with beautiful instruments wrought in raised needle-work. ‘Into the night go one and all,’ as Mr. Henley sings in his charming _Ballade of Dead Actors_.