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HISTORY OF LACE.

CHAPTEIi XIX.

LIMOUSIN.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a kind of pillow net

(“torchon entoilage,” Mr. Ferguson calls it) 1 for women’s sleeveswas manufactured at Tulle (Correze), and also at Auriliac. Fromthis circumstance many writers have derived “tulle,” the Frenchname for bobbin-net, from this town, where it has never, at anyperiod, been made.

The first dictionary in which the word “ tulle ” occurs is theFrench Encyclopaedia of 17(15, where we find, “ Tulle, une especcde dentelle commune mais plus ordinairement ce qu’on appelaitentoilage.” 3 Entoilage, as we have already shown, is the plain netground upon which the pattern is worked, 3 or a plain net used towiden points or laces, or worn as a plain border. In Louis XY. sreign, Madame de Mailly is described after she had retired fromthe world as “ sans rouge, sans poudre, et, qui plus est, sansdentelles, attendu qu’elle ne portait plus que de l’entoilage a bordplat.”* We read in the “ Tableau de Paris” how “le tul, la gazet le marli ont occupes cent mille mains.” Tulle was made on thepillow in Germany before lace was introduced. If tulle derivedits name from any town, it would more probably be from Toul,celebrated, as all others in Lorraine, for its embroidery; and as netresembles the stitches made in embroidery by separating thethreads (hemstitch, &c.), it may have taken its French name, tulle,German, Tull, from the points de Tulle of the workwomen of thetown of Toul, called in Latin, Tullurn, or Tullo. 5

1773. 6 au. do grarnle entoilage de * “Souvenirs de la Marquise debelle blonde a poix.” Crequy ”

17 C l fcn *“^ a 8 e a mouc * le8 u U L, s In au old geography, we find “Tulle,

j l -~ Com P te> de Madame du, Barry. Tuille three hundred years ago.”

* 'T'L^ rp,. „„

The word Tule, or Tuly, occurs in anEnglish inventory of 1315, and again, in“£ir Gawayn and the Green Knight;”

inanchettes, a 9 1., G3 1.”—Oomph* deMadame du Barry , 1770.