Convertible sofa of the 18th century at La Motte-Tilly and Soviet folding sofas

There was once a text about the Soviet passion for sofa-beds, which still haunts the hapless tenants of flats where a single room finds itself holding a bed, a sofa-bed and an armchair-bed, all against the backdrop of a carpet. For some reason there is a special class of public that is unsettled by evidence of the cramped life of large families in compact flats, and is saddened and even enraged by it. But this eighteenth-century sofa from the historic interiors of the Château de la Motte-Tilly, which turns into a bed, somehow does not look like a reminder of the phantom pains of a bygone aristocracy, nor like an object that makes the French wince awkwardly at bad taste or at the misplaced thrift of wealthy rentiers, practised at the expense of aesthetic ecstasies. I say this because, firstly, a sofa-bed is an excellent and useful thing. And secondly, our compatriots too are beginning to gather eagerly from the rubbish heaps that very Soviet way of life, fashionably called mid-century, realising that the past must be understood, and that innocent furniture should not be used as compensation for unresolved psychological problems