We see by this how little ground there is for giving the credit of the introduction of the manufacture of glass into France to King René. We shall find, however, later on, that this great patron of the arts was one of the earliest to take an interest in the Venetian glass of the early renaissance, and to bring the Italian workmen into France. The word _verre_, or in the earlier form _voirre_ or _vouarre_, was used vaguely in France even in mediæval times for any cup from which wine was drunk. This usage alone might be brought forward as a proof of the general prevalence of glass vessels at an early time. Modern French writers on glass cannot always escape the awkward expression ‘_un verre de verre_.’ In England, where the use of the word glass in this sense probably came in somewhat later, we find more than once in inventories of the fourteenth century the quaint combination, ‘_un verre de glass_.’ In France, however, the more frequent expression was ‘_un verre de fougère_,’ literally ‘a glass of bracken,’ and we have here a double metonymy. This association of bracken and glass may be frequently noticed in the old French writers. Long after the introduction of the _cristallo_ from Italy, there were many in France who preferred to drink from the old greenish glass; like the Germans of to-day, they declared that the wine tasted better. Even Boileau, late in the seventeenth century, talks of a man holding ‘_un verre de vin qui rit dans la fougère_.’ We see then what an important place bracken, _feucheria ad faciendum vitrum_, played in the old glass-works of France. Now glass made from fern-ashes must of necessity be of a very inferior quality, more so probably than that made from the beechwood ashes used from of old in Germany. The passage to the new methods would here be much more revolutionary than in the case of the latter country. This consideration may help to explain the fact that while the manufacture of potash glass survived and adapted itself to the new methods in Germany, it became in time quite extinct in France. The chronicles and romances of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries have been carefully searched by French scholars to find references to glass. Some ambiguity arises from the vague use of the word _verre_, to which I have already referred. But when Joinville tells us how the Comte d’Eu, in a moment of expansion, ‘_dressait sa bible le long de nostre table et nous brissoit nos pots et nos vouerres_,’ we can probably accept the latter vessels as _verres de verre_. [Illustration: _PLATE XX_ GERMAN LATE MEDIÆVAL GLASS 1. PRUNTED CUP FOR HOLDING RELICS 2. WAX COVER TO THE SAME, WITH SEAL]