A few years prior to the Revolution, the witty but rather too fiery Linguet was committed to the Bastille. It is seldom that confinement calms the bile of the confined; and accordingly Linguet, the next morning, was engaged in writing ab irato an article against his incarcerators; when he was interrupted by the entrance into his room of a tall, thin, pale, personage, whose appearance very much displeased the celebrated advocate.
“What is your business?” said the latter, in a marked tone of ill-humour.
“Sir,” answered the other, “I come—”
“I see you are come!” interrupted the impatient lawyer, “but you are not wel-come.”
“Possibly, Sir; but I am the Bastille barber, and I have come—”
Here the Figaro of state-prisoners burst into a laugh, and rubbing his chin significantly with his hand, exclaimed, “Ho! ho! my good Sir, that is a different matter; puisque vous êtes le barbier de la Bastille, rasez-la;” and after so capital a pun, he addressed himself in better humour to the cutting up of his adversaries.
The last barber who held something more than barber’s office under a Christian king was Olivier le Dain, the familiar of Louis XI. In Persia, it has been common for the monarch’s barber to be a prince over the people. The Khasterash, or “personal shaver,” is reverenced by all inferior citizens; and they see nothing incongruous in the fact that a palace and slaves are part of the rewards of a man who makes of the beard of the Shah an eighth wonder of the world. The beard, in fact, has ever been held in reverential regard by all Moslems, for the reason that their prophet never allowed instrument to diminish his own. An Arab would be as much horror-stricken now as ever Lacedemonian fugitive was of old, if in punishment for offence he were condemned to lose, by shaving, the half of his beard. He would infinitely prefer to lose half his family.
The wit of Linguet, mentioned above, recalls to my memory a trait of a Duc de Brissac. This nobleman was frequently heard saying, as he was at his matutinal toilet, and was about to raise his razor to the surface of his ducal chin:—“Now then, Timoléon de Cossé, God hath made thee a gentleman, and the King hath made thee a duke; nevertheless, it is right and proper that thou shouldst have something to do—therefore thou shalt shave thyself.” I may add that it was the fashion of the De Cossés to have one general Christian name; and I think it is Bungener who remarks, in his ‘Julian,’ that on a gentleman of this house being brought before the revolutionary tribunal, and asked what his baptismal name was, he answered indignantly, “Am I not a De Cossé? and what should my Christian name be but Timoléon?”—and he added an exclamatory “de par Dieu!” to show that though he was in danger of death, he could swear as recklessly as though he had still been in the galleries of Versailles.
I have said that philosophers have not disdained to write upon the beard, and I may be honestly proud of an opportunity to follow in the wake of the philosophers. Chrysippus has chronologized its history, and it is from him we know that it was not before the reign of Alexander that shaving became a fashion in the East. Timotheus, that renowned musician, long stuck to the olden mode, and played the flute in a beard as long as his instrument, πώγωνα μέγαν ἔχων ηὔλει: and how sweetly does that last word interpret the flute’s sweet sound—ηὔλει! it dies away like a cadence beneath the lips of as great a flutist as Timotheus, our own modest and able Richardson.