Like experience has shown us in our time, but in another manner, the beginning of the eighteenth century produced, in the manners and tastes of the French, an unconscious but tenacious reaction. It seemed as if the conceptions of romanticism had lasted long enough, and that the cycle of Middle Age chevaliers had passed away, and that a return to what is called nature was effected in literature and art. At the death of Louis XIV., Olympus and its gods, majestic poses and suns, had become wearisome. By a little half-open door, gaiety escaped from its prison and fled. For the Book that door was the hand of Sébastien Leclerc. The ancient school was replaced. Constrained during three quarters of a century, French manners began to be joyous under the regency of the Duc d'Orleans. If the representatives of another age still lived, if Rigaud always painted his portraits in peruke, there were new-comers, enlivened by the new fashions, less solemn and more bewitching. Le Brun was then far in the past, and as amusing to the ladies of the regency as are now to us the fashions of the Second Empire. The Book, after its manner, followed the movement, and gradually found the elements of its decoration in the tendencies of the day. Small sizes were multiplied, types showed elegance, and vignettes became more and more agreeable and intellectual. Amateurs had their _ex-libris_ engraved. The smallest pamphlets were covered with ornamental letters, vignettes, and tailpieces, already very clever. Costume also, in its shorter and lighter form, gave to designers a means of agreeably composing a page of illustration and disseminating fancy in the figures. These revolutions worked themselves simply from day to day, as taste became more pronounced and exacting.