Traffic with the Far East, however, was probably a more important factor in the formation of the Queen Anne style than any other influence. The Oriental taste had reached Amsterdam and London before Paris felt it. Throughout the Seventeenth Century, the English and Dutch East Indiamen poured porcelain, lacquer, and other products of Oriental art into their respective capitals, and even the bitter trade rivalry between the two did not arouse the French from their indifference till the arrival of the Siamese embassy in 1690. Long before this, however, Mazarin had tried to bring Oriental goods into favour. The daughter of Gaston d’Orléans, La Grande Mademoiselle, notes in her diary (1658), that the Cardinal “took the two queens (Anne of Austria and Henrietta, wife of Charles I. of England), the princess (Henrietta’s daughter) and myself, into a gallery that was full of all imaginable kinds of stone-work, jewelry, and all the beautiful things that came from China, crystal chandeliers, mirrors, tables, cabinets of all kinds, silver plate, etc.” All these Oriental wares were given away by the magnificent Cardinal in a lottery in which every guest drew a prize. Twenty-five years later, the same adventurous lady who wrote the above had a quarrel with her unrecognized husband, the Comte de Lauzan. To patch up peace, he sent her from England a cargo of Chinese wares. Before the port L’Orient gained its name by its trade with that quarter of the world, Paris received its Chinese and Indian goods chiefly through London. Consignments from the distant Jesuit missions to their headquarters were largely instrumental in bringing Eastern art to the notice of the public. There is an entry in Evelyn’s _Diary_ (March 22, 1664): [Illustration: PLATE XVIII] “One Tomson, a Jesuite shewed me such a collection of rarities, sent from ye Jesuites of Japan and China to their order at Paris, as a present to be received in their repository, but brought to London by the East India ships for them, as in my life I had not seen. The chiefe things were rhinoceros’s horns; glorious vests wrought and embroidered on cloth-of-gold, but with such lively colours, that for splendour and vividness we have nothing in Europe that approaches it ... fanns like those our ladies use, but much larger, and with long handles curiously carved and filled with Chinese characters; a sort of paper very broad, thin and fine like abortive parchment, and exquisitely polished, of an amber yellow, exceedingly glorious and pretty to looke on; several other sorts of paper, some written, other printed; prints of landskips, their idols, saints, pagods, of most ugly serpentine monstrous and hideous shapes, to which they paid devotion; pictures of men and countries rarely printed on a sort of gum’d calico transparent as glasse; flowers, trees, beasts, birds, etc., excellently wrought in a sort of sleve silk very naturall.”