Sylvie was on her way out of Lyon when she saw it, the ten small drawers in a long row, the curved legs, the dark oak top marked with two centuries of work, and she knew before she asked the price that it was over her budget. She bought it anyway. This is the master's workbench from a 19th-century Lyon silk factory, where the ten drawers held different colors of silk thread and the long lower shelf carried the bolts of finished fabric. The dramatic curved legs in the lyre shape mark this as a piece made for a wealthy Lyonnais workshop rather than a country one, and the top is scarred with the cuts and impressions of every length of silk that was measured, marked, and shipped from this exact surface to the dressmakers of Paris. Dresses worn at Worth, at Doucet, at the salons that defined 19th-century French fashion, were cut from fabric that crossed this bench. Sylvie places it against a long wall in a foyer with a single tall arrangement of branches at one end and the shelf below holding the books she actually reads.
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