The tapestries on the looms are garish, crude, modern art in its cheapest expression; or else they are brilliant-hued copies of time-softened paintings that were never meant to be translated into wool and silk. The looms are always busy, nevertheless. There is always preserved a staff of officers, the director, the chemist of dyes, and all that; and the tapissiers are careful workmen, with perfection, not haste, in view. The State directs the work, the State pays for it, the State consumes the products. That is the Republic's way of continuing the craft that was the serious pleasure of kings. But there is now no personal element to give it the vital touch. There is no Gabrielle d'Estrees, nor Henri IV; no Medici, no Louis XIV, no Pompadour. All is impersonal, uninspired. Men who have worked in the deadening influence of the Gobelins declare that the factory cannot last much longer. But it is improbable that France--Republican France, that holds with bourgeois tenacity to aristocratic evidences--will abandon this, her expensive toy, her inheritance of the time of kings. In the time of the Second Empire it was the fashion to copy, at the Gobelins, the portraits of celebrated personages executed by Winterhalter. The exquisite portrait of the beautiful Empress Eugenie by this delectable court painter has a delicacy and grace that is all unhurt by contrast with more modern schools of painting. But fancy the texture of the lovely flesh copied in the medium of woven threads, no matter how delicately dyed and skilfully wrought. Painting is one art, tapestry-making is entirely another. But that is just where the fault lay and continued, the inability of the Gobelins ateliers to understand that the two must not be confused. The same false idea that caused Winterhalter's portraits to be copied, gave to the modern tapissiers the paintings of the high Renaissance to reproduce. Titian's most celebrated works were set up on the loom, as for example the beautiful fancy known as _Sacred and Profane Love_, which perplexes the loiterer of to-day in the Villa Borghese. Other paintings copied were Raphael's _Transfiguration_, Guido Rene's _Aurora_, Andrea del Sarto's _Charity_. There were many more, but this list gives sufficiently well the condition of inspiration at the Gobelins up to the third quarter of the Nineteenth Century. Paul Baudry appeared at about this time striking a clear pure note of delicate decoration. The few panels that he drew for the Gobelins charm the eye with happy reminiscences of Lebrun, of Claude Audran, a potpourri of petals fallen from the roses of yesterday mixed with the spices of to-day.