Named the Sphinx, this pair of cast iron firedogs was never meant to be bookends until Sylvie decided they were. Originally chenets, the iron dogs that held the logs in a French hearth, they take the form of two reclining sphinxes with the pharaoh's nemes headdress, the iron darkened and softened by years of fire. The face comes out of the Egyptian Revival taste that swept France after Napoleon's campaign on the Nile, when pharaohs and sphinxes turned up on everything from mantel clocks to the front of a fireplace. Sylvie sets them on a shelf with a stack of old books between them, the kind with soft cloth spines and gilt titles.
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