The ordinary house of the middle classes does not enjoy that periodical refurbishing and redecorating accepted as necessary north of the Channel. With a wife as keen as himself on living well within their joint income the French head of the family is not urged to put aside a certain annual sum for new curtains, carpets, chair and sofa covers, and such expensive items. The initial outlay on the home is generally considered to be almost sufficient for a lifetime if care is used in maintaining what has been purchased. It is not necessary to have entered many French homes to become familiar with the typical bedroom which is reflected faithfully enough in the average hotel. One essential feature of a bedroom as the Anglo-Saxon knows it is alone allowed to form a feature of the furnishing of the apartment. It is the bed, draped as a rule with elaborate curtains and coverings and surmounted by some form of canopy. A massive feather-bed-like eiderdown, covering about one-half of the necessary area of the bed, reposes at the foot and leaves those unfamiliar with these nightmare pillows wondering if the people who use them are a practical race. The dressing-table and washstand are generally hard to find. If there is a _cabinet de toilette_, these essentials of a bedroom will be stowed away in what is often a roomy cupboard, and where the feature does not exist, both pieces of furniture will be so modest in dimensions and sufficiently well disguised to be almost unrecognisable at a casual glance. Conspicuously placed, however, will be an ample sofa and a writing-table not necessarily provided with adequate writing materials. Every effort is made to give the sleeping apartment as much the atmosphere of a reception-room as sofas and chairs and an absence of toilet appliances will allow, for when, right away in the fifteenth century, it became the custom for the sovereign to hold audiences in the bed-chamber the rest of French society imitated the royal example, until it became an established usage in _bourgeois_ circles as much as in those of the class which enjoyed the direct influence of court fashions. Democratic and Republican France has swept away the whole edifice of the monarchy, but unconsciously perpetuates in a most remarkable fashion the weakness of a sovereign to carry on the business of the day from his bed! The average husband regards the _cabinet de toilette_ as the peculiar possession of his wife, and would hesitate to enter that annexe to his bedroom unbidden. Possibly to those who have been brought up with this idea the English custom of providing a small dressing-room for the husband and allowing _madame_ paramount rights over the whole bedroom may seem unaccountably odd.