An evening digression

This being the fireplace in the front room of our holiday cottage which started this one off. The first thought being that the original Victorian iron fireplace had probably come without much if anything in the way of a framing timber surround at all. In our own house, the smaller fire places, no longer present, were set in the walls, did not reach the floor and had no framing at all.

The second thought was to wonder about the mantlepiece, which for me is the shelf above such a fireplace as this. A place for storing bibelots and important odds and ends. Or clues in the novels of Agatha Christie. While to BH, the mantlepiece is the surround as a whole.

Off to Wikipedia, where I find that I have not spelt the word correctly, and it should be mantelpiece, from mantel. More important, the mantel started off, back in the day, as a sort of hood to catch the smoke from a fire, a fire which had perhaps not completed its migration from the centre of a room, and below a hole in the roof, to inside an outer wall,  and below a chimney above. With mantelpiece being the whole thing, according to BH usage, and mantelshelf being what I had known as the mantlepiece. 

I also read that when fireplaces were important, they were commonly used as a vehicle for flamboyance and display. Which gradually wound down as fireplaces became less important, less central to a room. More or less to vanishing point in new-build houses today.

From where I am sent off to the giant fireplace in what used to be the palace of the counts of Poitiers, back in the days when these counts had not submitted to the king in Paris.

An elaborate fire place, in three parts, occupying more or less the whole of one end of the great hall. With the hall itself being described at reference 2.

The drawing above may have been work of or to do with Viollet-le-duc of reference 3, perhaps best known in this country for his vigorous restorations of ancient monuments in France. From which I learn that it is quite OK to have fireplaces below windows, something which has troubled me in the past from time to time.

The three chimneys are outside and can be seen through the windows.

The blurb attached to the drawing.

With the paragraph of French including several interesting words.

First 'tuyau', which can be a pipe, here the pipe of a chimney, but also a tip, in the sense of a racing tip or a bit of information given to a detective by an informer. With various idiomatic uses, vaguely related.

Second, and equally tricky, 'pignon' here the gable or gable end of a building. But also a pine kernel, a gear or the sprocket of the back wheel of a bicycle, perhaps what we call the cassette. Again, with various idiomatic uses.

While according to Wikipedia at reference 4, the gable end of a building, like the mantelpiece, was often a vehicle for elaborate decoration. Sometimes just decorative, as in the little houses which often enclosed statues of kings and saints in medieval churches. Or our own Charing Cross, originally erected by Edward I in memory of his late wife. Where the gables do indeed suggest pine cones.

And I learn that our 'mantel' might be 'manteau' in French, also their word for an overcoat. Again, one can see how the similar shapes might give rise to this conflation. See also our own 'mantle'.

This snap is, I think, a modern view of same from the outside. Matching the various parts with the drawing is left as an exercise for the reader.

I also came across 'salle des pas perdu', a phrase I had vaguely understood to be a large space used for miscellaneous legal assembly in front of a court room proper, without having bothered to look it up before. But you can read all about it at reference 5.

PS 1: following the remarks about YouGov at reference 6, they popped up again this (Saturday) morning, interested in my views on football teams, on any recent encounter with the NHS and various personalities. Despite remembering that I have actually been to football matches at no less than three different grounds - West Bromwich Albion, Norwich and Arsenal - I could not help with the first of these. Or with the last, having only heard of two or three of the thirty or forty personalities, films or video games offered. I wonder how many of their respondents actually have something to say about this sort of thing?

[Many of the rich non-doms who left the UK after changes to the tax regime no longer need full-time staff © Digital Vision/Getty Images]

PS 2: from time to time, I comment on the class-conscious Simenon's remarks about proper valets and suchlike having striped yellow waistcoats. See, for example, reference 7. So the image of same at reference 8 included above caught my eye. 

For some reason I had assumed that the stripes were vertical, but here the horizontal stripes contrast nicely with those of the trousers below. But has the image been faked up on the basis of some vague memory? Is the whole stripes thing a fantasy spun out of a few stray remarks from Simenon? Perhaps not, with Getty Images being a reasonably reputable outfit. Despite their search turning up nothing relevant on either 'butlers stripes' or 'striped waistcoats'. Maybe they ought to sub their searching out to Google Images.

PS 3: but what about the snap above? How careful is the FT about such things?

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fireplace_mantel.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_Poitiers.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Viollet-le-Duc.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gable.

Reference 5: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salle_des_pas_perdus.

Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/07/imperial-health.html.

Reference 7: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/10/fake-46.html.

Reference 8: Non-dom exodus hits London market for butlers: Demand for high-end domestic staff has fallen since the Budget ended tax loophole for weahttps://www.gettyimages.co.uk/editorial-imageslthy UK residents - Josh Spero, Financial Times - 2025.

Reference 9: https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/editorial-images.