Louis XV furniture
Louis XV furniture was designed not for the vast palace state rooms of the Versailles of Louis XIV, but for the smaller, more intimate salons created by Louis XV and by his mistresses, Madame de Pompadour and Madame DuBarry. It included several new types of furniture, including the commode and the chiffonier, and many pieces, particularly chairs and tables, were designed to be moved easily rearranged or moved from room to room, depending upon the kind of function.
With the death of Louis XIV on 1 September 1715, his grandson, Louis XV, born in 1710, became King. Because of his young age, France was ruled by a Regent, Philippe of Orleans, until 1723. During this period, the style of furniture changed little from the Louis XIV period; it was massive, lavishly decorated and solemn, designed for the gigantic state halls of the new Palace of Versailles. In 1722 Louis XV moved from Paris, where he had lived with the Regent, to Versailles, began his own rule, and gradually imposed his own taste on the arts, architecture, and furniture.
List of big-game hunters
Louis XV (1710–1774) was King of France from 1715 to 1774. To the King hunting was an all-absorbing affair, in 1722 he drove from his coronation to his first hunt in the Villers-Cotterêts forest and by 1725 he hunted 276 days in the year and in that same year he was at the death of 362 kills, having ridden 3,121 leagues (12,166 km) behind his hounds. The King hunted with a huge pack of hounds called "The Great Pack", made up of 40 to 90 couples (80 to 180 hounds) of different breeds, the number increasing during his reign. The pack was actually three packs divided between the game hunted, wild boar, wolf and red deer, and employed a staff of over 500 noblemen (each being on duty for 3 months at a time) and 250 horses, with a further 2,000 horses available for the use by the King, his courtiers and guests. Between 1743 and 1767 the kills of red deer alone by the Great Pack was 2,651 stags.