AND SAVONNERIE CARPETS. 281 
buildings of the king under Louis XIII. and Louis the XIV. only kept 
the direction of his manufacture in tapestry until 1667, the period when 
the work of this establishment ended. 
Under the name of " Manufacture des meubles de la Couronne," 
(court furniture) Louis XIV. in 1662, established a truly artistic and 
industrial Gobelins school, inhabited by artists and workmen chosen 
from amongst the most skilful. The edict however, relative to this estab- 
lishment did not appear until November, 1667 ; in it we read that " the 
manufactures and dependencies hereof shall be regulated according to 
the orders of the Master Colbert, superintendent of the building, and 
the particular direction of the Master Le Brun, chief painter to the 
king, in conformity with letters granted to him 2nd March, 1663. 
That the superintendent of the buildings, and the overseer under him 
shall keep the manufactory full of good painters, masters of tapestry de 
haute lice, goldsmiths, founders, engravers, lapidaries, &c. ; that the' 
workmen employed in the aforesaid manufactures shall be exempt from 
all logements de guerre (billeting of soldiers in time of war or siege). 
That apprentices, to the number of sixty, chosen by the superintendent 
shall be maintained and employed in the school of the director ; that 
very express inhibitions and prohibitions be given to all merchants and 
other persons to prevent their purchasing or causing to be imported the 
tapestries of foreign countries, &c." 
L'hostel des Gobelins, which, since the year 1603, had only been held 
in tenancy for the use of the Crown, was in 1662 purchased by Colbert, 
in the name of the king, as well as eight other estates near it, all for the 
sum of 90,242 livres, 10 sols. The area of the manufactory, comprising 
the public walks, gardens, meadows, and different sorts of tillage extend- 
ing between the two branches of the Bievre as far as the Crouleborbe 
mill, amounts to 12,266 square toises (a) about 46,610 square metres (a 
toise is six feet, English). 
The workshops for tapestry in the Louvre (still there), and those of 
the Faubourg Saint-Germain, were at that time successively incorpo- 
rated with those of Gobelins. 
Like Henri IV. his grandfather, Louis XIV. induced a great number 
of tapestry makers in haute and basse lice to come over from Flanders ; 
he placed them at Gobelins, as well as in the manufactory of Beauvais, 
founded in 1664. 
Flanders continued thus to be the principal seat of this manufac- 
ture, its prosperous condition, in that country being traced to a remote 
period. So far back as the twelfth century, the Flemish manufacturers 
were nourishing ; in the sixteenth, the emperor Charles-Quint had given 
(a) This is still the superficies of the Gobelins manufactory. Out of the space 
exceeding the wants of the service, somewhat more than a hundred small 
allotments are distributed to the housekeepers of the establishment, all cultivated 
as gardens. 
