--- title: "Inside a Mattress Maker’s Workshop: Episode 7 - Les Ateliers Le Briand" url: https://le-briand.fr/en/museum/mattress-maker-chronicle/episode-7/ description: "The story of a mattress maker’s workshop and the network of traditional bedding makers in a Paris neighborhood. Episode 7." lang: en-US updated: 2026-10-07 translations: fr: https://le-briand.fr/musee/chronique-matelassier/episode-7/ source: https://le-briand.fr/en/museum/mattress-maker-chronicle/episode-7.md --- [Back to the chronicle contents](https://le-briand.fr/en/museum/mattress-maker-chronicle/) # A Mattress Maker in the Faubourg – Episode 7 Published: March 7, 2020 Updated: August 21, 2023 Author: Patrice Sébille ![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) Before the passing years began to weigh on me, **I fell asleep like a young child**. All I needed was to feel tired and lie down, and in an instant I was in the arms of Morpheus! The very idea of good bedding was therefore almost foreign to me. At bedtime, I might notice that a bed felt particularly inviting—or quite the opposite—but it mattered little to me. **That was a weakness in my commitment as a business owner**. I certainly had good reasons to believe in my product, but they were not the reasons most people would consider important. I viewed the wool mattress through an engineer’s eyes. What captivated me was **the remarkable ingenuity of our forebears**. Over the generations, **their movements had been refined** until they reached an optimum: **the least possible energy was spent for the result achieved**. With next to nothing in the way of tools, and faced with a volume and weight of wool far beyond what physical strength alone could handle, **the mattress maker always remains in control**. And all of it is done freehand. Instinct may take longer to develop than learning the proper use of a tape measure and calculator, but I was discovering the extraordinary productivity and precision of skilled bedding makers. Like a long-distance runner, the worker conserves energy to endure, yet never sacrifices the care given to the work. If such arguments were not enough to persuade the average person, surely it was compelling to see wool—now treated almost as waste by sheep farming—recover both a practical and therefore a commercial value here. With markets for French agriculture shrinking to almost nothing as the Common Agricultural Policy faced its planned disappearance, reviving a market such as traditional bedding hardly seemed unnecessary to me. And when you also realize that the wool from a mattress at the end of its life **will be reused in full to make a new mattress**, every bit as comfortable and durable as the last, what more is there to say? It is sustainable development in its purest form. All that remains is to act. For several years, my wife had dreamed of a large bed—or at least one larger than our perfectly ordinary bed. Partly from thrift and partly because I was unconvinced that the purchase was worthwhile, I had dragged my feet. Now that I had **become a manufacturer**, it was difficult to refuse again, even if the bedroom was a little cramped. Since my predecessor was handing the business over to me during the holiday season, I devised an amusing plan. I would make the bed, then enlist my ten-year-old son to help wrap it before placing the enormous packages beneath the Christmas tree. It was a symbolic way to mark the handover, a joke for the children, and a lovely surprise for my dear wife. It worked on every level, even better than I had hoped. One small uncertainty remained: how comfortable would it actually be? I had no concerns and was sure everything would go perfectly, but might some incompatibility spoil my wife’s sleep? Nothing serious, I told myself. If she did not like it, the mattress would go straight back to the workshop to be taken apart, and by the following day I would think no more about it. A few days later, however, my wife raised the subject again. **You know**, she said, since you made this mattress for us, **my back no longer hurts**! I had not known about her back pain. It was nothing serious, she explained, but for years she had woken every morning with one tender spot. It was not truly painful, but something caught there and made her feel stiff, right in the small of her back. After half an hour and a cup of coffee, it would pass. Since changing beds, however, it had vanished. She now woke feeling fit and ready at once. I was stunned. Because I slept like an angel, I had never fully grasped the problem. Yet **I understood the power my trade placed in my hands without understanding exactly how it worked**. If **my customers’ well-being truly depended on me**, I trembled at the thought that I might not have a firm enough grasp of that reality. Until then, I had regarded mattress and bedding making as a purely technical skill, and believed I had made good progress on that front. Now I was discovering its true greatness. The entire **added value** that my new craft brought to other people lay in **providing well-being**. It sounds simple enough, but every person who sleeps on a mattress is different. My predecessor had never even spoken to me about this knowledge. In these old trades, apprenticeship—and here the word takes on its full meaning—meant becoming one with the profession itself, in all its breadth and complexity. **It happened through long immersion, almost by osmosis, slowly and with scarcely any explanation**. There was only the example set by one’s elders, which the apprentice followed as best he could. If he stayed the course, what he gained in the end was called, quite simply, **experience**. I had tried to skip the stages in a matter of months. At the very moment I took the reins of the Le Briand mattress workshop, I discovered that my ignorance was even greater than I had feared. Now that I was alone at the helm, would I have the strength and tenacity to overcome every difficulty and keep everything under control? ## The other episodes of the chronicle ![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/) ![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) ### Episode 2 Out of work, he lends his brother a hand turning a workshop in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine into an apartment. On the floor below, a profitable mattress maker is running at full speed, yet doomed to close for lack of a buyer. What if someone did something to stop it? [Read episode 2](https://le-briand.fr/en/museum/mattress-maker-chronicle/episode-2/) ![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/) The ingenuity of these movements, refined across generations, makes better sense at the workbench; to watch the craft take shape, 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 show you how three tools can bring a mountain of wool under control.