At the time of the
"lace war"
, economic battles could be settled with porcelain blows.
The stake was financial and very important, inseparable from the prestige struggles.
European porcelain came out of the oven shrouded in legends, it imitated this inaccessible Far East, a mythical imperial horizon populated by fabulous animals.
She gave the rulers of the Age of Enlightenment the aura of alchemist princes, she continued the diplomacy of gifts and canons by other means, with translucent paste flowers and writing cases in the shape of little monkeys.
Read also:
In Chantilly, an elephant in a porcelain store
Twice, the elective throne of Poland could have gone to a prince of Condé.
The Prince de Conti, grand-nephew of the Grand Condé, had in 1697 had to step aside before Frederick Augustus of Saxony.
Chantilly porcelain would be the revenge of the Condés, and the idea of installing the exhibition in the Battles gallery of their castle, under red tents fringed with gold, would not have displeased the most sumptuous of cousins.
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