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Miriam was glad of her thin voice piercing the darkness she did not want to sleep. She loved the day that had gone; and the one that was coming. She saw the room again as it had been when Mademoiselle had looked up towards the toiles d'araignees. She had never thought of there being cobwebs up there.
The gay designs of the printed cottons that came to us from East India, a hundred years ago, and the fantastic chintzes known as Chinese Chippendale, that were in vogue when the Dutch East India Company supplied the world with its china and fabrics; the dainty French toiles de Jouy that are reminiscent of Marie Antoinette and her bewitching apartments, and the printed linens of old England and later ones of the England of William Morris, all these are at our service.
Paris is full of repairers, and in the little streets on the other side of the Seine old women sit in doorways on a sunny day, defeating the efforts of time to destroy the loved toiles peintes. But this haphazard repair, done on the knee, as a garment might be mended, is not comparable to the careful, exact work of the restorer at her frame.
Miriam began playing very softly "The March of the Men of Harlech," and got to her feet and went marching gently round the room near the walls. Sitting up, Mademoiselle listened. Presently she rounded her eyes and pointed with one finger to the dim roof of the attic. "Les toiles, d'araignees auront peur!" she whispered.
"If you need canvas" Wayland hesitated then, gravely: "There are, in my room, a number of artists’ toiles old chassis with the blank canvas still untouched." "Exactly what we need!" exclaimed the other. "What luck, now, to meet a painter in such a place as this!" "They belonged to my father," explained Wayland.
The word toils comes from the French toiles, meaning "cloths," and also used for the nets put round part of a wood, in which birds are being preserved for shooting, to prevent their escaping. The expression to "turn" or be "at bay," by which we mean that there is no chance of escape, but that the person in such a situation must either give in or fight, comes from hunting.
He could hardly forgive the honest Germans their coarse flax, and whene'er my traitors of countrymen did amiss, a would excuse them, saying, 'Well, well; bonnes toiles sont en Bourgogne: that means, there be good lenten cloths in Burgundy. But indeed he beat all for bywords and cleanliness. "Oh, Eli! Eli! doth not our son come back to us at each word?" "Ay. Buss me, my poor Kate.
"Unless it is Neferu-Ra in person. You remember the Neferu-Ra of Leconte de Lisle, the Beauty of the Sun?" * "Voici qu'elle languit sur son lit virginal, Très pâle, enveloppée avec des fines toiles." "But of course you don't know. You know nothing of verse. And yet verses are so pretty. Come! Let's go to work."
These capotes then made of goldbeaters' skin were, also, it appears, known at an earlier period to Mme. de Sévigné, who did not regard them with favor, for, in one of her letters, she refers to them as "cuirasses contre la volupté et toiles d'arraignée contre le mal."
The Gobelins to-day is almost purely a museum, not only in the treasures it exposes in its collection of ancient "toiles," but because here is preserved the use of the high-warp loom, and the same method of manufacture as in other and better times.
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