--- title: "A Paris Mattress-Making Business: Episode 2" url: https://le-briand.fr/en/museum/mattress-maker-chronicle/episode-2/ description: "The story of a mattress-making business in Paris and the network of traditional bedding makers in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Episode 2." lang: en-US updated: 2026-10-07 translations: fr: https://le-briand.fr/musee/chronique-matelassier/episode-2/ source: https://le-briand.fr/en/museum/mattress-maker-chronicle/episode-2.md --- [Back to the chronicle contents](https://le-briand.fr/en/museum/mattress-maker-chronicle/) # A Mattress Maker in the Faubourg: Episode 2 Published: March 7, 2020 Updated: October 1, 2023 Author: Patrice Sébille ![Old postcard of the Passage Vandamme in Paris: a mattress on trestles in front of a wooden fence](https://img.le-briand.fr/uploads/2020/03/matelassier-paris-histoire-musee-fabrication-matelas-laine-sommier-tapissier-episode-2.jpg) Everyone has some idea of what unemployment is like, especially those who have actually experienced it… But explaining just how deep a mess I was in requires **a little background**. By the end of 1997, without my knowing it, **my fate had been sealed**… Good grief, I have already run into the boundary of my chosen starting point. I will try to keep this short. I had lost my job, but more importantly I had lost any chance of finding another one that continued my career. A change was more than necessary. Whether it meant a slight change of course or a radical upheaval, I seemed at first to have countless options within reach. But **coming up with something concrete and motivating enough to heal my wounds** without diminishing my status, and then finding the energy and resolve to pursue it, proved far more difficult. Little by little, I was backing myself into a dead end. **The life of a stay-at-home father, which I had been forced to lead during those long months without work, brought me little fulfillment**, and it gradually deepened my distress. So when **my brother asked me to help with his upcoming renovation**, I jumped at the chance despite my lack of enthusiasm for masonry, plastering and plumbing. His girlfriend’s father had given them a property, a good-sized workshop space that needed to be completely transformed into a proper apartment. The man was well past retirement age, yet no serious buyer had come forward for his mattress-making business. As the owner of the building, he **had begun dismantling the mattress-making business**, intending eventually to close it for good. Before making this gift to my brother and his future wife, **the workshop occupied two levels**: - the ground floor - the first floor The entire operation first had to be moved to the basement and ground floor. Only then could my brother and I begin laying flooring, fitting drywall and plastering… Between the Paris I had known as a child and the one where I lived as an adult, there was **a particularly striking gulf in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine neighborhood**. Only ten years earlier, **every courtyard had been a hive of bustling craftspeople**. The decline of the local economy, already underway since the postwar years, was accelerating. After all, a fashionable restaurant promised far greater returns than keeping an old varnisher’s workshop alive; **the prevailing logic of the time always won out**. As we hauled materials, hammered, demolished and drilled, ran yet another extension cord, borrowed the tall stepladder or some other tool, **we came into contact with the busy mattress workshop** every day. **Little by little, it became familiar to me**. One day, the contradiction between this profitable mattress-making business operating at full capacity and its planned disappearance **struck me as utterly absurd**. At the end of the road, **the employees faced nothing but unemployment**, while the owner would lose all the value he had built up. Then an idea took root, though I cannot say when or how: **what if I did something to stop it?** Yes, why not? It was a perfectly honorable way out, after all. ## The other episodes of the chronicle ![Old photograph of a vaulted workshop: a nun and women workers in front of stacks of mattresses](https://img.le-briand.fr/uploads/2020/03/matelassier-paris-histoire-musee-fabrication-matelas-laine-sommier-tapissier-episode-3.jpg) ### Episode 3 Burned by two failed successions, Jacques Le Briand agrees to judge him on his work. First day at the workshop, September 1999: the beginner is slow, hopelessly slow. Among his friends, though, everyone already sees him as the man saving a business more than a century old. [Read episode 3](https://le-briand.fr/en/museum/mattress-maker-chronicle/episode-3/) ![Old photograph of a Parisian bedding shop, a family posing on the doorstep](https://img.le-briand.fr/uploads/2026/10/matelassier-paris-histoire-musee-fabrication-matelas-laine-sommier-tapissier-episode-4-sans-filigrane.jpg) ### Episode 4 With no office, and still hiding his situation from his children, he fills in his paperwork in the cafés of the neighborhood. At Le Jean Bart, which becomes “Thierry’s,” cabinetmakers, upholsterers, an accountant and a lawyer end up adopting him. For the first time in his life, he has drinking buddies. [Read episode 4](https://le-briand.fr/en/museum/mattress-maker-chronicle/episode-4/) ![Old photograph: mattress makers carding wool in a courtyard, in front of striped mattresses](https://img.le-briand.fr/uploads/2020/03/matelassier-paris-histoire-musee-fabrication-matelas-laine-sommier-tapissier-episode-5.jpg) ### Episode 5 Taking over a business is not just a matter of writing a check. A compulsory training course, the trade register, an avalanche of forms: in 1999, becoming a business owner is an obstacle course. By late November, on the eve of a new millennium, he is about to turn his life upside down. [Read episode 5](https://le-briand.fr/en/museum/mattress-maker-chronicle/episode-5/) ![Old photograph: a woman mattress maker at work in a cobbled courtyard, a mattress stretched on its frame](https://img.le-briand.fr/uploads/2026/10/matelassier-paris-histoire-musee-fabrication-matelas-laine-sommier-tapissier-episode-6-sans-bord.jpg) ### Episode 6 Everything is ready for January 1, 2000, except the loan, which still hasn’t come through. On the first Monday of the year 2000, he finds himself running an unauthorized workshop. And when the bank changes its terms at the last minute, he raises the money from his family in just over 24 hours. [Read episode 6](https://le-briand.fr/en/museum/mattress-maker-chronicle/episode-6/) ![Old postcard: mattress makers on the quays of the Seine in Paris](https://img.le-briand.fr/uploads/2026/10/matelassier-paris-histoire-musee-fabrication-matelas-laine-sommier-tapissier-episode-7-sans-filigrane.jpg) ### Episode 7 He had looked at the wool mattress with an engineer’s eye, won over by the ingenuity of the craft. A large bed made for his wife and left under the Christmas tree shows him something else: this trade provides well-being. Now alone at the helm, he realizes how much he still has to learn. [Read episode 7](https://le-briand.fr/en/museum/mattress-maker-chronicle/episode-7/) ![Old photograph: mattress makers at work in a Paris street, next to a pile of wool](https://img.le-briand.fr/uploads/2020/03/matelassier-paris-histoire-musee-fabrication-matelas-laine-sommier-tapissier-episode-8.jpg) ### Episode 8 Some of his upholsterer clients are past retirement age and miss the bustling Faubourg of their youth. Getting to know them, he discovers craftsmen who are in no hurry to retire, stay sharp and greet his arrival as that of a young man. Since then, that breed of craftsman has all but disappeared. [Read episode 8](https://le-briand.fr/en/museum/mattress-maker-chronicle/episode-8/) ![Old photograph: mattress makers at work on a Paris quay, at the foot of a stone staircase, wool spread on the ground](https://img.le-briand.fr/uploads/2020/03/matelassier-paris-histoire-musee-fabrication-matelas-laine-sommier-tapissier-episode-1-1.jpg) ### Episode 1 Patrice Sébille had promised to tell the story of the Le Briand company, founded in 1880, and his own as head of the workshop, in the spirit of the serials on La Fabrique de l’Histoire. The question was where to begin. It would begin with a dismissal, in 1998. [Read episode 1](https://le-briand.fr/en/museum/mattress-maker-chronicle/episode-1/) The workshop marked for closure in this chapter never closed; to see that story still unfolding, we invite you to : [Contact us](https://le-briand.fr/en/contact/) [Visit us](https://le-briand.fr/en/address/) …and we will be delighted to let you hear, with the machines running, what this neighborhood almost lost.