and it's a characteristic
of the art of Lalique,
because Lalique was
not very fond of expensive material.
When he chose materials, it was
not for the price of the material,
but for the colour,
the texture of the material.
So with Lalique, it wasn't
the gemstones in the jewellery,
it was the design,
that's what added the value.
Yes, yes. It's a very naturalistic
piece, you know.
It is engraved to imitate,
to suggest, the angelica.
It's a plant, you know.
And here you have little diamonds
to suggest the reflections
of the sun on the plant.
Right. It's a very lovely piece.
And the gentleman who bought this
from Lalique,
he would be buying this
for his wife?
Maybe not, maybe not.
Well, this is Paris.
Many men went to Lalique,
and they asked for jewels for a lady.
"Can you make something for my
special friend," that kind of thing?
Yes, yes.
What about Lalique,
how did he feel about women himself?
Lalique, I think...
We know that Lalique did love
many women during his life,
had many mistresses in Paris
and London, everywhere,
and it's the reason why he
is a good designer of jewels,
because I think he loved
very much women.
Some of his pieces are erotic.
We have a box, and you will see
at the centre, a naked woman,
and she opens her cloak...
Her cloak? Yes.
And so around her,
you have young men, also naked.
They are completely dazzled
by the nudity.
Are they? They're falling away,
the shock, thrilled.
It's like a goddess, you know.
She is like a butterfly,
or maybe like a bat.
Because bats and butterflies
were very appreciated
by the artists of Art Nouveau.
Lalique created dramatic jewellery
about women, for women.
His world, like so much of
Art Nouveau, is a no-man's land,
where the woman reigns supreme.
Lalique's fascination with natural
forms of all kinds wasn't unusual.
Collecting and categorising nature
was the great obsession of the time.
To study insects close-up,
Lalique came here to Deyrolle,
the cabinet of curiosities,
in the St Germain district of Paris.
This extraordinary bestiary
is really a trophy cabinet
of what was going on
in the late 19th century.
There was an explosion
in international travel,
in collecting, in taxidermy,
in botany.
This kind of stuff was brought home
by gentlemen in their swag bags.
In the middle of the 19th century,
Darwin's radical new theories
about evolution
and man's place
in the natural world
exploded established beliefs.
Nature, savage nature,
red in tooth and claw.
This was a new battleground
between religion on the one hand
and science on the other.
For designers,
it was a badge of modernity,
a new way of understanding
the world.
They brought nature into Paris.
But they did so on new terms.
For designers like Lalique,
nature was there to be embellished.
The lily was there to be gilded.
Swarms of insects,
clouds of butterflies, birds, bats,
they all buzzed and flapped
around Lalique's work.
In fact, if it hadn't
all looked so beautiful,
it might have been
like a Hitchcock film.
This is the art of metamorphosis.
Birds, insects and women dissolve
in and out of each other
in weird and wonderful ways.
Nature's sensuous, but sinister.
It's blue skies
and bumblebees one minute,
and bats at bed-time the next.
Lalique may have used cheap
materials,
but his jewellery was lavish
and dramatic -
perfectly designed
for the dim electric lights
of Paris' nocturnal world.
This is the world-famous
restaurant Maxim's.
Sarah Bernhardt
and the literary crowd
partied here till the early hours.
Entrepreneur Eugene Cornuche
redesigned it in Art Nouveau style
in 1899 for the World Fair.
He knew that Art Nouveau,
famous artists
and a ready supply of courtesans
could turn his investment into gold.
Today it has the feel
of an upmarket bordello.
They say every man who came here
arrived with a woman,
but it was never his wife.
You can practically hear the violins
soaring away,
the booming laughter and gossip
of the politicians
and the artists and actors
and painters who came here,
and the tinkling laughter
of their new muses or courtesans.
Pierre Andre, thank you so much
for letting me see Maxim's.
You are very welcome
in this incredible place.
It is incredible, isn't it? It is.
With its mirrors and gilt,
the spiral staircase.
It is a symbol of what we call
in France La Belle Epoque.
It really represents
such a dream in people's minds
that it stays from that time,
and it's still today the same.
Maxim's was Art Nouveau.
Is there a sense that
the normal rules didn't apply?
Once you stepped over the doorway
of Maxim's... Absolutely.
The only rules correct
in such a place
was elegance and glamour.
In Maxim's, many times
we had writers, novelists...
Like Marcel Proust,
did he come here?
Of course, he came many, many,
many times. Sarah Bernhardt?
And Sarah Bernhardt, who was
one of our best clients.
It was really the place where you
had to come to see and be seen.
It showed exactly all the taste
they had at that period,
and the best was all around
Art Nouveau.
Maxim's sensuous curves
and women in their gardens of Eden -
they play on the idea of innocence,
purity, and, of course sin.
There are mirrors absolutely
everywhere in here.
It's like a hall of mirrors
from a circus.
Or maybe something a bit seedier,
a bit kinkier,
a little bit more sinister.
In 1899, Maxim's typified
much of the Art Nouveau
that was being created.
Fashionable and extravagant,
it had come to represent
fin-de-siecle decadence and excess.
But there is another side
to this story.
If you think that Art Nouveau
is all exquisite vases
and curly furniture,
well, you couldn't be more wrong.
Amongst the Art Nouveau designers
at the 1900 World Fair,
at least one felt that the new style
had a more serious mission.
His stand featured
a working furnace,
and surrounding it,
a display of glass vases.
They were all dedicated to a cause
which exposed a seismic rift
in French society.
The designer behind this display
was Emile Galle.
Emile Galle was the troubled
genius of Art Nouveau,
he was creative, an innovator,
an entrepreneur.
He was also a passionate believer
and campaigner for social justice.
That, in the end,
would cost him dearly.
Emile Galle is one of the most
fascinating characters to emerge
in the story of the French arts in
the latter part of the 19th century.
He was absolutely a man of his time,
and in that respect,
is a key figure in the story
of Art Nouveau.
Philippe,
what sort of a man was Galle?
Very complex personality,
a poet, one might say,
a philosopher, a dreamer,
who found his medium,
particularly in glass.
A man with very diverse interests,
he was a great botanist,
he had a strong political agenda,
he was a liberal
with a tremendous social conscience.
Emile Galle was also
an industrialist,
who built from an
inherited family business