ODD FASHIONS.
“Avec ceci finit la comédie; allez-vous-en, gens de la noce, et dites du bien de l’auteur.”—Crispin à la Foire.
The fashion of tattooing has a singular origin. We are indebted for our knowledge thereof to Clearchus, who tells us that the women of Scythia, having seized upon some Thracian women who dwelt in their vicinity, traced on their bodies, by means of needles, certain marks, which the latter could not contemplate without being made very angry. The lady who went down Regent-street the other day with the shop-ticket affixed to her new shawl, and which contained the announcement, “Very chaste, £1. 5s.,” was not half so ridiculous as these poor Thracian ladies, with the etchings about them drawn by their dear Scythian cousins. It does not seem ever to have entered the heads of the victims that they might have concealed their annoyance beneath a garment. They did not wear garments at that time. They however hit upon a device not unworthy of that page of the Duke de Vendôme who, losing his shoulder-knot of ribbons, on being pursued as he was leaving the boudoir of a maid of honour, hurried to the room where his fellow-pages were sleeping and cut the knots off from every laced coat in the apartment, and so escaped detection.
The Thracian women fixed upon as happy an expedient. They so mixed up the tattooed marks with other designs, that the original drawings were entirely lost in the embellishments, like Handel’s airs in a certain lady’s cadences. By this means the characteristic sign of their shame and ignominy was no longer discernible, and the mode of tattooing became a mode indeed in Thrace. A young lady there could not have had a greater compliment paid to her at a ball than to be told that, front and back, her tattooing was in the true style of the Thracian improvement on the Scythian design. The dear creature might blush, but she would feel happily sure that she had made a conquest, and would make all her young friends savage by telling them the secret.
Among the odd dressers of the last century was the celebrated French philosopher and poet, Monsieur de la Condamine. Like George Selwyn, he was an indefatigable attendant at executions. He of course did not forget that of Damiens, the most horrible butchery ever enacted on the Grève, and at which French ladies were present with opera glasses, the better to enjoy the spectacle. Even so wits, philosophers, and “females” honoured the Mannings with their presence, in front of Horsemonger-lane gaol.
Condamine went for ever in search of truth, like Diogenes looking for a man. At the execution of Damiens, he pushed his way close to the dread officers of the law, and there, with his trumpet fastened to his ear (for he was “as deaf as a post”), and his pencil and tablets in his hands, he watched and recorded progress. At each tearing of the flesh by the pincers, or at each blow dealt by the bar which crushed the limbs on which it fell, Condamine exclaimed, “What does he say now? what does he say now?” The satellites of Charlot, the hangman, wished to drive him away as a troublesome fellow, but the executioner civilly remarked that “the gentleman was an amateur, and might stay if he liked.” With all this, De la Condamine was a simple-minded and humane man. In our London streets he produced a great effect; there he walked, dressed as laxly as Sir Simon Slack, and carrying with him a huge umbrella, almost as huge an ear-trumpet, a telescope, a compass, and a map of London permanently unfolded. He questioned everybody he met, but as he did this in English, as he thought, of which he did not comprehend a word, he was exceedingly like a metaphysician, who necessarily does not understand either what he says or what is said to him. His singular appearance in the streets speedily brought a counterfeit presentment of him on the stage, and, from King downwards, all the English actors who played Frenchmen dressed them after the pattern of M. De la Condamine.
As I have above noticed the Paris executioner,—“Monsieur de Paris,” as he used to be called,—I may further remark that the personage who filled that office some twenty years ago was one of the best-dressed and best-informed men I ever met with. He might have been taken for a reverend abbé, who did not deem that the dignity of priest was hurt by uniting with it the joviality of man. He was a man indeed of bloody hands, but he had gentle affections too; and he loved his children, ay, reader, as well as thou lovest thine own.
The Earl of Ferrers, who murdered his steward in 1760, was condemned to be executed for his crime. He had been originally married in a suit of white kerseymere and silver; and he chose to be hung in the same suit, it being as appropriate to one occasion, he said, as the other. Walpole, discerning the effect this might have on fashion, remarks, “I suppose every highwayman will preserve the blue handkerchief he has about his neck when he is married, that he may die like a lord.”
The Earl dated his misfortunes from the day on which he married the sister of Sir William Meredith. He accused the lady of having met him drunk at an assembly, and having kept him so till the ceremony was over. Had he charged her with making him drunk, the lady, who was a faithful wife, might have been more to blame; and as for keeping him drunk afterwards, he was seldom subsequently sober, and had only himself to blame.