AND SAVONNERIE CARPETS, 279 
nary, established another at Trinity Hospital in Paris, (a) which rapidly 
reached a high degree of prosperity. 
Henri IV. in 1597, gave additional impetus to this industry, by 
creating a new manufactory in the house of the Jesuits, at the Faubourg 
Saint-Antoine, vacant since the expulsion of those monks. Laurent, 
an excellent worker in tapestry, (b) had the management of it, and 
Dubreuil, a famous painter (c) was entrusted with the furnishing of 
patterns. The Jesuits having been re-established, one party of the 
tapestry workers, received towards the end of the year 1603, accommo- 
dation in the galleries of the Louvre ; another party, probably the most 
important, were removed to the house of the Gobelins, and augmented 
by a number of Flemish workers. 
Marc de Comans and Francois de la Planche, both natives of the 
Low Countries, were entrusted with the enterprise, and to them was 
committed the special care and direction of this new manufacture of 
Flanders tapestry.(J) Henri IV. ennobled them and conferred on them, 
by letters patent (January 1607), the freedom, not only of Paris, but of 
every city in the kingdom where they wished to establish themselves. 
The house of Gobelins had then enjoyed more than a century of 
industrial celebrity ; Jehan Gobelin, first of the name, dyer in scarlet, 
established himself, about 1450, on the banks of the river de Eievre, the 
water of which was at the time considered of a superior quality for 
dyeing, (e) According to a very uncertain tradition he was a native of 
Reims. Growing prosperity was, in this family, the result of the per- 
severing efforts of several generations, and very soon we find the name 
of Gobelin allied to that of ancient and noble families, the magistracy, 
the army, finance, and government. There were still in the middle of 
the seventeenth century dyers of this name ; but they disappeared 
towards the year 1650, about the period when the Dutchman, Jean 
Gluck, brought into France a new process for dyeing scarlet. The 
(a) Founded in the eleventh century, and suppressed at the commencement of 
the Revolution, This Hospital occupied the greater part of the small Island com- 
prised between the streets Saint Denis, Grenetat and Guerin-Boisseau ; the 
opening of the Boulevard of Sebastopol has caused the last traces of it to dis- 
appear. 
{b) Sauval, ''Antiquities of Paris," t. xi. (c) Ibid. 
(d) This name seems only to have been given on account of the essential dif- 
ference of the Paris tapestry makers, and that of their Flanders confreres; the 
former generally employed the haute lice loom, the latter worked only in basse 
lice. 
(e) A reputation very much lowered in the present day ; the waters of this 
river, infected for more than a mile of their course towards the city of Paris, by 
the deposits of innumerable bleach-greens and other industrial establishments, 
are no longer fit for dyeing ; they blacken silver, and destroy by their putrid 
emanations, the colours of the patterns employed in Gobelins, For a great num- 
ber of years, there has not been used, even for washing, or in the workshop of 
this establishment, for dyeing, any but filtered Seine water. 
