By 1700 the decorative arts were well on the downward path. Bernini had been dead twenty years, but his influence, together with that of Borromini, was still a living thing, and was still working irreparable mischief. Sir M. Digby Wyatt, in a powerful article written for Owen Jones’s _Grammar of Ornament_, referring to Borromini, says: ‘From his fervid imagination and rare facility as a draughtsman and designer, he soon obtained ample employment; and in his capricious vagaries, every tendency to extravagance that Bernini’s style possessed Borromini contrived to caricature. Until his death, in 1667, he continued sedulously occupied in subverting all known principles of order and symmetry, not only to his own enrichment, but to the admiration of the leaders of the fashion of the day. The anomalies he introduced into design, the disproportionate mouldings, broken, contrasted, and re-entering curves, ... became the _mode_ of the day, and all Europe was speedily busy in devising similar enormities. In France the fever raged speedily, and the popular style, in place of the quaint but picturesque forms to be seen in the engravings of Du Cerceau, 1576, substituted the more elaborate but less agreeable ones to be found in Marot, 1727, and Mariette, 1726-7.... Despite this debasing influence,’ continues our author, ‘many of the French artists of the time, both of Louis XIV. and XV., in the midst of their extravagances, made many beautiful ornamental designs, showing in them a sense of capricious beauty of line rarely surpassed.’ [Illustration: La Danse, Louis XV, skin leaf, mother of pearl stick, carved, painted, & gilt. 22” X 11-3/4”. The Duchess of Portland.] [Illustration: Pastorelle, Louis XV, skin leaf, tortoiseshell stick, with gold incrustations 18-1/4” × 10”. The Duchess of Portland.] This, although written at the period of perhaps the very lowest ebb of the decorative arts, the mid-Victorian era, pretty well sums up the matter, and is a fair estimate of the decorative tendencies that obtained at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The general character of the fan, therefore, necessarily partook of this debasing influence, and reflected the ornamental vulgarities and fashionable inanities of the time. Thus we have, in moulded ornament, a profusion of those extravagant shell-like cartouches which have become identified with the periods of Louis XV. and XVI.; curly structures elaborately perforated, beginning and ending at will, observing no reasonable or well-defined law, but expressing only the caprice of the artist. These either formed the starting-point for the lighter ornaments, or were associated with naturalistic swags and festoons of fruit and flowers, masks, ribbons, etc.