Britain experienced its hottest, driest heat wave in over two hundred years in 1976. Several places reached record-breaking temperatures, and people had no choice but to flock to swimming pools to cool off.
The weather was not yet that hot. After entering through the waterfall entrance, they first came upon a corridor with ferns growing along its walls, and it was cool inside. At the end of the corridor was a pool. On the far bank stood a flight of steps, and at the very top was an enormous gold-framed mirror, almost as large as a door.
Such a large mirror was exceedingly rare in the Middle Ages. Even the Mirror Room at Versailles was assembled from small pieces of mirror. Venetian mirrors, made from glass and mercury alloy, had been exorbitantly expensive ever since their appearance three hundred years earlier. A Venetian mirror with an exquisite silver frame could sell for three times the price of a Raphael painting, and the French king had played a part in driving up the price of mirrors.
But the French were not content merely to be buyers. In the seventeenth century, Louis XIV smuggled four Venetian craftsmen into France. The operation was carried out in great secrecy, and the Venetians did not discover them for a long time. Thus, in 1666, the first factory in Normandy, France produced Venetian mirrors.
But a year later, the best craftsman died. Three weeks later, another died. The remaining two craftsmen tried to flee but failed. They went mad, shouting and screaming in the streets. Yet none of it mattered anymore, because the French had already mastered all the secrets.
By the nineteenth century, the Germans had invented silvered mirrors, with silver deposited onto the surface of glass and covered with a protective coating. It was