Mauvais goût

It was dinner at a prize-winning hotel in Burgundy. I looked, stupefied, at an awkward arrangement of trapezoidal plates, unaccommodating to food and unergonomic to both eater and plongeur. There was a water glass of triangular section and silly cutlery that would bring even Philippe Starck’s most empurpled morphological fantasies into the arena of commonsense. I thought wistfully about the simple charm of the old Duralex glass. The timelessly perfect round-shouldered Burgundy bottle’s unaffected handsomeness only served to make its table-top companions look all the more ridiculous.

Modern France is in a terrible state as far as design is concerned. Renault’s peerless record of ingenuity is gone: it has not produced a worthwhile innovation for nearly 20 years. Anyway, who sold us the idea of French superiority in taste in the first place? Why do we continue to beat ourselves up about a presumed inferiority in matters of style and design? Has anyone stopping for a brackish coffee on the A26 autoroute been able to maintain any delusion of French grandeur?

Grandeur aside, many of our words calibrating the leagues of snobbery are French in origin: hauteur, arriviste and parvenu, for example. And looming large is the idea of goût. In France, the word for taste ceased to suggest merely a sensation in the mouth, and went through a metaphorical change.

The objet du goût was a project by Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, who translated furniture and china into tools of social aspiration, what economists call positional goods. The ambitious Poisson had hunted down Louis XV. Once captured, the King gave her an estate at Pompadour south-east of Paris and thereafter Poisson was relaunched as Madame de Pompadour. She posed as a pink and fleshy Venus for Boucher, had Ange-Jacques Gabriel design Le Petit Trianon and filled Versailles with fresh flowers daily.