Question answered

The answer to the question I posed yesterday was, of course, really very prosaic: the mattresses were actually of pretty poor quality. We discovered this about eighteen months after we had finished furnishing the house. The beds and mattresses had been bought from a large chain store through its web site so we had no opportunity to see the quality of the goods before they were delivered. There was a double bed for the ground floor bedroom, and two singles to go upstairs. They had to be singles as we would never have got a double bed up the stairs, although I suppose it could have been hauled in through the window on the end of a length of rope.

Whether or not the beds we bought are typically French, I couldn’t say. I do know they are not typically English. They start off just the same, with the head and foot being joined by side pieces, but then they start to differ. The French beds then have an inner metal frame that is supported by lengths of timber placed between the side pieces of the wooden frame. This has timber slats fixed across it, these slats having been placed in position under tension so that they are bowed upwards, thus providing springs.

The mattress is simply a piece of cotton-covered foam rubber, about six inches thick. One advantage of this is that the mattress warms up very quickly on cold nights, but of course foam rubber also starts to compress after comparatively little use. After less than two years we needed to replace the mattresses, and that was after they had been used only lightly. Presumably this is why every French market has its mattress seller.

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Another view of the market at Chateaubriant.