Snuff in fashionable France, from Molière's stage to the Paris goldsmiths

In 1665 Molière opened his play Dom Juan with a servant holding a snuffbox. Before any plot happens, Sganarelle delivers a speech in praise of tobacco: "Whatever Aristotle and all philosophy may say, there is nothing to equal tobacco. It's the passion of honest people, and whoever lives without tobacco isn't worthy to live." The joke is mostly about manners. Once a man takes tobacco, Sganarelle says, see how obliging he becomes, "delighted to give it right and left, wherever he finds himself".

Grated at home

Snuff could be made fresh at home, by grinding a tightly twisted roll of tobacco, a "carrot", on a rasp. The Amsterdam Pipe Museum, which keeps examples, describes the snuff rasp as the tool "used to pulverize a tobacco carrot into freshly grained snuff tobacco", and notes that rasps were often finely carved "in order to impress relatives and friends". The French for grated is râpé, and English borrowed it as "rappee" (the dictionaries date it to 1730 to 1740). The word came to mean a coarse, dark snuff.

A king who didn't approve

The crown made money from tobacco long before the court took to snuff. In 1674 Louis XIV's minister Colbert put the sale of tobacco in France under a royal "tobacco farm", a monopoly that lasted until the Revolution abolished it in 1791.

Louis himself disliked the habit, and his court knew it. The memoirist Duc de Saint-Simon tells of a night at Marly in the mid-1690s when two of the King's daughters were found smoking pipes they'd sent for from the Swiss Guards. The smoke gave them away, and the King "severely scolded them" the next day. Snuff was easier to hide. In 1712 Saint-Simon notes that the Dauphine took snuff "with the knowledge of Madame de Maintenon, but without that of the King, who would have made a fine scene if he had discovered it".

Saint-Simon also recorded how badly it could go if you got the manners wrong. On campaign in Italy in 1701, the Duke of Savoy opened his snuffbox in front of the generals. Marshal de Villeroy reached over and helped himself without a word. Savoy flushed. He tipped the whole box out on the ground and handed it to a servant to be refilled, then carried on talking as if nothing had happened.

After 1715

The Metropolitan Museum of Art puts it simply: snuff "didn't become prominent in France until after the 1715 death of King Louis XIV, who disapproved of the habit". By the 1730s, the museum says, it was "among the most fashionable French customs".

Fashion meant the box. The Met notes that Paris "set the gold standard for luxury goods in the 18th century", and that merchants "would advertise new boxes with each season as they would a style of dress or shoe". A gold box set with diamonds was the most expensive kind you could buy. Many more were made in cheaper materials such as porcelain, and the grandest were "frequently presented as royal gifts".

Very few people made the gold ones. The Met's catalogue entry for a Paris box of 1736 to 1738 reckons that only 20 to 30 craftsmen worked in the trade at any one time, and that they were allowed to work only in daylight, in workshops in full view of the street. A single box could pass through the hands of a goldsmith, an engine turner, a chaser, an enameller and a miniature painter before it was finished.

Jean Ducrollay made a gold and enamel box decorated with peacock feathers for the Duc d'Aumont in 1744, and it's now in the Wallace Collection in London, alongside boxes by Pierre-François Drais and Louis Roucel. The Met has a Ducrollay snuffbox of 1754 to 1755 from the Wentworth bequest.

Where the Parisians bought it

Paris had its tobacconists too. One of them, À la Civette on the rue Saint-Honoré, gives 1716 as its founding date, the year after Louis XIV died. We've told its story in its own Journal piece.

On the shelf

The word outlasted the rasp. You'll find it on Mullins & Westley Black Rappee and Wilsons of Sharrow Brunswick Black Rappee.

Sources

• Molière, Dom Juan ou le Festin de pierre (1665), Act I, scene 1. French text: Project Gutenberg. The English is our own translation.
• Louis de Rouvroy, Duc de Saint-Simon, Memoirs of Louis XIV and His Court and of the Regency, English translation, volumes 2, 3 and 8: vol. 2, vol. 3, vol. 8.
• Amsterdam Pipe Museum, "Snuff rasps in wood and ivory", 2013: pipemuseum.nl.
• "Rappee", Dictionary.com and the American Heritage Dictionary.
• Seita company history (the 1674 tobacco monopoly and its end in 1791), Reference for Business.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, "The Spectacular Snuffboxes of The Met": store.metmuseum.org.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Box, Paris, 1736 to 1738, 48.187.438: catalogue entry; and Jean Ducrollay, Snuffbox, 1754 to 1755, 48.187.446: catalogue entry.
• À la Civette, "Notre histoire": alacivette.com.
• Charles Truman, The Wallace Collection: Catalogue of Gold Boxes (Paul Holberton, 2013), publisher's description; Sotheby's, Collection Ribes, lot 55 (2019), catalogue note on Ducrollay and the Aumont box.