“The ‘elegant,’” says Mercier, “pays visits of not more than a quarter of an hour’s duration. He no longer proclaims himself the ‘friend of the duke,’ the ‘lover of the duchess,’ or the ‘indispensable man at little suppers.’ He speaks of the retirement in which he lives, of the chemistry which he studies, of his distaste for the great world. He lets others speak; and while they speak, an almost imperceptible smile of derision flutters on his lips. He is dreaming while he listens to you. He does not noisily leave a room, but glides out of it; and a quarter of an hour after he has quitted you, he writes you a note, as if he had not seen you for months, just to show you that he is an absent man.”
The “elegant” was not without his uses. He brought down superlativeism. Exaggeration of speech and of dress went out as he came in. This change extended to female as well as male society. He rendered social intercourse however a difficulty for intellectual men. The latter had indeed no difficulty in talking of science with the wise, of knowledge with the learned, of war with the soldier, and of dogs and horses with the nobles; but he did find a difficulty in talking about nothing with those fashionable women who cared only for the subject most patronized by the “elegant.”
What dreadful guys were the French children of the middle of the last century! Their monkeys, who danced upon cords, for the edification of the grande nation, were not more ridiculous. Fancy a boy seven years old: his head was powdered profusely, and between his little shoulders hung the wide tie or bag of his hair. Therewith he wore a full-sleeved and broad-skirted coat, immense ruffles, a cocked hat, not on his head,—it was not big enough for that,—but beneath his arm; and upon his tobacco-pipe of a thigh there hung a needle of a sword! And this young old man could hold himself erect, could bow like a judge, and was kept lean by late hours. He had, in the common acceptation of the words, neither wrists, arms, nor legs of his own. He seemed jointless, but he had been taught how to sit down, and how to walk a minuet.
Mercier groans over the contrast between French and English boys of this period. Take, he says, a little Gallic monseigneur to London, and introduce him to the son of a lord, a boy of his own age. What does he see? Clean, fair, and long flowing hair; the skin pure and healthy; the head unmolested by a peruke; the body supple and robust. The little Frenchman might be sulky thereat, but he found consolation in his gold-laced embroidery. He thinks to make an impression on the other boy by his profound bows, at which the English lad laughs; and when, according to the French custom, the little monseigneur advances to embrace the youthful Briton, the latter skips off, with the exclamation, that they wanted to take him in by pretending to introduce him to a playfellow, which proved to be only a monkey.
The extravagances of fashion were carried to the utmost in France when it was the custom for ladies not only to keep the head powdered and uncleaned, but to wear over it a napkin less clean still. The authors of the period are murderously satirical against a mode which especially prescribes that the napkin should not only seem dirty, but be so. Lady Mary Wortley Montague however thought the idea admirable, and she adopted it with a nasty alacrity.
The fashion nevertheless could not long “obtain,” and soon we find la Mode raised from an art to a science, and women devoting themselves to the study thereof with an intensity worthy of a better cause.
A pretty woman, says Mercier, meaning thereby a pretty Frenchwoman, daily goes twice through the ceremony of the toilet. The first was a mystery, from which lovers were as rigorously banished as the profane from solemn rites in the temples of old. A lover, says Mercier, dare not enter his lady’s tiring-bower but at an appointed hour. You may deceive a woman, but you must never come upon her by surprise: that is the rule; the most favoured and the most liberal of lovers never dares to infringe thereon.
Mercier however seems to have had free admission to the performance of the early ceremony; for he says that thereat mysterious use was made of all the cosmetics whose application beautifies the skin. He only alludes to “other preparations which, among women, form a science apart,—ah! I might say, a whole encyclopædia.”
The second toilet he describes as a game invented by coquetry. If faces be thus made before a glass, it was, he says, with a studied grace. It was not contemplation, but admiration. If the finger was run through the long curls, it was only for effect, for they had already been duly arranged and perfumed. It was at this second toilet that the world was present. The lovers fluttered round the half-dressed object of what they called their love,—and that object was only a quarter dressed, and looking not unlike Anadyomene herself as to form and feature and position, but with a glance in her eyes and a significance in her bearing that bespoke much more the Venus Pandemia than the Venus Ourania. And there too were the abbés, who were permanent lovers wheresoever they were to be found; they were of all sizes and conditions of health, but they were all, without exception, gay, gallant, witty, impudent, and blasphemous beyond all belief, and happily beyond all conception. Reputations were made and unmade at these morning toilets; and as for the detail of the dressing, while the coquet and causerie were going on, it was very like that which Pope has so brilliantly described in the Rape of the Lock, and in which a reputation died at every word.
In modern days France has become more than ever the locality where the Popess Fashion is enthroned, and whose slipper is reverently kissed by a devoted world. Parenthetically may I say that the custom of kissing the Pontiff’s slipper arose from the time when one of the Leos, having been offended by an act of one of his fingers, cut it off, and in his strange humility would no longer permit his hand to be saluted by the faithful. That was a queer cause for a strange fashion; but it rests only on legendary authority. In France causes as strange, sometimes more and sometimes less pleasant, have fixed the fashion of the hour. Last century,—that is to say, during something more than the traditionary “nine days” of that century,—the rage in Paris was for pantaloons made, from aloes, the colour of a lady’s finger-nails, between rosy tint and delicate blue.