Enfilade

From the V&A:

Reading Europe for the V&A
Crowdsourcing Project for the forthcoming 1600-1800 galleries

As part of the development of our new Europe galleries, the Victoria and Albert Museum is collecting quotes from published and unpublished material written in Europe between 1600 and 1815. We are looking for passages that show how people lived during this period, and how they might have used or perceived the objects that are now in our collections. These quotes will inform our work and may also appear in the gallery displays. Please see ‘Quotes & Images’ for some of the passages we have already collected. The new Europe galleries are part of FuturePlan, our major programme of renewal and restoration. The galleries are due to open in 2014.

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Sample Quote:

Coffee is widely drunk in Paris: there are a great many public establishments where it is served. In some of these establishments news is disseminated; in others, people play chess: there is one place where coffee is prepared in such a manner as to sharpen the wits of those who drink it; at any rate, of those who emerge from there, not a single one fails to be convinced that he is four times cleverer than he was upon entering.

-Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, Persian Letters,
written 1717, published 1721 in Holland; translated in 2008.