Madelon.
Elle est tout à fait de qualité; le sublime en est touché délicieusement.
Well might Gorgibus, in choleric mood exclaim:
Ces pendardes-là, avec leur pommade, ont, je pense, envie de me ruiner. Je ne vois partout que blancs d’œufs, lait virginal, et mille autres brimborions que je ne connais point. Elles ont usé, depuis que nous sommes ici, le lard d’une douzaine de couchons, pour le moins; et quatre valets vivraient tous les jours des pieds de moutons qu’elles emploient.
We are not well enough informed in such manners to know if these family recipes be worthy to be compared with the “capons greaz” which good Queen Bess carried with her, as we learn from Nichol’s “Progresses,” to make the hair to shine like a mallard’s wing. We own to a natural dread of such domestic manufactures, and always greatly admired that fine piece of strategy on the part of Dr. Primrose, when observing his daughters busily concocting some compound over the fire—and informed by little Dick of its true nature—he grases the poker and capsizes the ingredients.
The nomenclature of wigs is very ample, a complete system of classification might be adopted, and genus and species discriminated with the greatest nicety; there were Wigs Military, Legal, Ecclesiastical, and Infantile; we can only find room for a few varieties:
- Perruque à bonnet.
- —— à nœuds.
- —— ronde.
- —— pointue.
- —— naissante.
- —— à deux queues.
- —— à tonsure.
- —— à la brigadière.
- —— de l’Abbé.
- —— à boudin.
- —— à papillons.
- —— à deux marteaux.
- —— à trois marteaux.
- —— à bourse.
We shall only be following the usual course of Fashion if we pass from the French Court to Whitehall. In England the ladies are said to have been beforehand with the gentlemen in the great Wig movement. Pepys writes (1662), “By and bye came La Belle Pierce to see my wife, and to bring her a pair of perruques of hair as the fashion now is for ladies to wear, which are pretty, and one of my wife’s own hair, or else I should not endure them.” The year following Pepys made a similar investment on his own account—“November 3, Home, and by and bye comes Chapman, the perriwig maker, and upon my liking it (the wig), without more ado, I went up, and then he cut off my haire, which went a little to my heart at present to part with it; but it being over, and my perriwig on, I paid him £3, and away went he with my own haire to make up another of; and I by and bye went abroad, after I had caused all my maids to look upon it, and they concluded it do become me, though Jane was mightily troubled for my parting with my own hair, and so was Besse.
“November 8, Lord’s Day.—To church, where I found that my coming in a perriwig did not prove so strange as I was afraid it would, for I thought that all the church would presently have cast their eyes on me, but I found no such things.”
The same minute chronicler informs us that the Duke of York put on a perriwig in February, 1663, and that he saw the king in one for the first time the following April.