1. J.E. Crowley, The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America (Baltimore, 2001).
2. Comfort in English derived from the medieval French conforter/confort (= soutenir/encouragement); A.J. Greimas, Dictionnaire de l’ancien français jusqu’au milieu du XIVe siècle (2nd edn, Paris, 1977) s.v. ‘conforter’. But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the usual French term to assess satisfactory physical circumstance was commodité. Only in the early nineteenth century did French usage of the term confort take on such connotations, having borrowed the term back from English with a new meaning; Le Grand Robert de la langue française: dictionnaire alphabétique de la langue française, edited by A. Rey, 9 vols. (2nd edn, Paris, 1985), s.v. ‘confort’;
3. P. Perrot, Le luxe: Une richesse entre faste et confort XVIIIe-XIXe siècle (Paris, 1995) pp. 65–90;
4. A. Pardailhé-Galabrun, La naissance de l’intime: 3,000 foyers parisiens XVIIème-XVIIIème siècles (Paris, 1988) p. 331;
5. J.-P. Goubert, Du luxe au confort (Paris, 1988) pp. 21–9;