Sèvres — the French royal porcelain factory, producing the most prestigious European porcelain from the mid-eighteenth century — appears in poems about royal luxury, the aesthetics of power, and the status of beautiful objects at the courts of Louis XV and Louis XVI; A poem about Madame de Pompadour — who was instrumental in establishing the Vincennes factory that became Sèvres — might describe her as "the woman who gave France its finest china, as she gave France its taste for everything that required taste"; The Sèvres ground colours — rose Pompadour, bleu céleste, gros bleu — are specific enough to generate ekphrastic poems: "the turquoise ground, the reserved panels painted with watteau fêtes — a whole philosophy of pleasure encoded in glaze"; In a poem about the French Revolution, the Sèvres service becomes a symbol of the old regime: "the royal cipher on every piece — the pieces surviving the cipher, the cipher surviving on the pieces"; A poem about a state gift might describe a Sèvres vase: "not the thing itself but the argument it made — that France was the standard by which beauty was measured"; Stendhal's attentiveness to the beautiful surfaces of ancien régime France, mourned in his early nineteenth-century novels, finds its ceramic parallel in Sèvres: the porcelain that made the world seem arranged, until it wasn't.