Except for a few days, Queen Victoria has not resided at Anne’s favourite Kensington since her accession. In her early days, the then little princess,—clad so simply that it is wonderful the middle classes did not avail themselves of the example, and dress their darlings less tawdrily,—might be seen of a bright morning in the enclosure in front of the palace, her mother at her side. On one of these occasions I remember seeing a footman, after due instruction given, bringing out to the lively daughter of the Duke of Kent a doll most splendidly attired,—sufficiently so to pass for the εἴδωλον of an heiress, and captivate whole legions of male poupées, all gold without, and sawdust within. The brilliant effigy, however, had no other effect upon the little princess but to put her in a passion. She stamped her little foot and shook her lustrous curls, and evidently the liveried Mercury had unwittingly disobeyed her bidding. He disappeared for a minute or two, but returned, bearing with him a very torso of a doll. A marine-store dealer would not have hung up such an image, even to denote that he dealt in stolen goods, and “no questions asked.” But the unhappily deformed image was the loadstone of the youthful affections of the princess. She seized it with frantic delight, skipped with it over the grass, gambolled with it, laughed over it, and finally, in the very exuberance of joy, thrust it so suddenly up to the face of a short old lady, who was contemplating the scene from the low iron fence, that the stranger started back and knew not well what to make of it; thereupon the maternal Mentor advanced, and something like an apology appeared to be offered, but this was done with such a shower of saucy “curtsies,”—so droll, so rapid, so “audacious,” and so full of hearty, innocent, uncontrollable fun,—that duchess, princess, old lady, and the few spectators of the scene, broke into as much laughter as bienséance would permit; and some of them, no doubt, “exclaimed mentally,” as well-bred people do in novels, that there was a royal English girl, who had most unquestionably a heart and a will of her own,—and may God bless both!
I have noticed above how queens of foreign birth introduced to our ancestresses fashions of which their young imaginations had never dreamed. The origin of all fashion then, as now, was in France; and thitherward we now will take our way.
“LA MODE” IN HER BIRTH-PLACE.
Chacun à sa mode, et les ânes à l’ancienne.—Modish Proverb.
The Honourable James Howard, in the year 1764, wrote a sprightly comedy, entitled ‘The English Monsieur.’ The hero is an individual who sees nothing English that is not execrable. An English meal is poison, and an English coat degradation. He once challenged a tasteless individual who had praised an English dinner; and, says the English Monsieur, “I ran him through his mistaken palate, which made me think the hand of justice guided my sword.” He can tell whether English or French ladies have passed along the moist road before him, by the impressions that they leave.
“I have often,” he remarks, “in France, observed in gardens, when the company used to walk after a small shower of rain, the impression of the French ladies’ feet. I have seen such bonne mine in their footsteps, that the King of France’s maître de danse could not have found fault with any one tread amongst them all. In this walk,” he adds, “I find the toes of English ladies ready to tread upon one another.”
Subsequently our “English Monsieur” quarrels with a friend, because he had found fault with “a pair of French tops” worn by the Philogallist, and which were so noisy when the wearer moved in them, that the other’s mistress could not hear a word of the love made to her. The wearer justifies the noise as a fashionable French noise; “for look you, Sir, a French noise is agreeable to the air, and therefore not unagreeable, and therefore not prejudicial to the hearing; that is to say, to a person who has seen the world.” The slave of Gallomania even finds comfort, when his own mistress rejects him, in the thought that “’twas a denial with a French tone of voice, so that ’twas agreeable!” and when she bids him a final adieu, he remarks to a friend, “Do you see, Sir, how she leaves us? she walks away with a French step.”
Such was the early allegiance rendered even in this country to the authority of France in the matters of “Mode,” of that ever-variable queen, of whom a French writer himself has despairingly said, that she is the despot of ladies and fops; “La mode est le tyran des femmes et des fats.”
But Paris is the focus of insurrection, and Fashion itself has had to endure many a rebellious assault. Never was rebellion more determined than that carried on against towering plumes.