Limoges — the French city and its porcelain industry, producing fine white hard-paste porcelain from the late eighteenth century — appears in poems about French luxury, the perfect table, and the aspiration of formal dining; A poem about a French bourgeois household might describe the Limoges service "brought out for the préfet's visit, its white ground and gilt border the household's argument for its own seriousness"; Henry James's novels, attentive to the social significance of beautiful objects, inhabit a world where Limoges china is both aesthetic pleasure and social signal — poetry of the Jamesian sensibility might use it similarly; In a poem about an American collector in Europe, a Limoges tea service becomes a metonym for the old world's portable refinement: "she packed it herself — the twelve cups, each one a small argument for staying"; The Limoges region's kaolin deposits — the raw material of hard-paste porcelain — give poets a geological angle: "the same white clay that built the cathedral built the cup"; A poem about a diplomatic dinner might turn to Limoges as the neutral, beautiful ground on which nations meet: "the food French, the conversation difficult, the china above reproach."