The great demand for everything French, including the language, offered an opening for many Frenchmen in London; for all the men and women of fashion were not in the position of De Grammont, who sent his valet, Thermes, to France every week to bring back the latest fashions from Paris. "Nothing will go down with the town now," writes a contemporary author, "but French fashions, French dancing, French songs, French servants, French wines, French kickshaws, and now and then French sawce come in among them, and so no doubt but French doctors may be in esteem too."[979] In almost every book written at the time there is some reference to the mania for French fashions. And some time later the Abbé Le Blanc relates how, on one occasion in England, a self-satisfied Englishman taunted him thus: "Il faut que votre pays soit bien pauvre, puisque tant de gens sont obligés de le quitter pour chercher à vivre en celui-ci. C'est vous qui nous fournissez de Maîtres à danser, de Perruquiers, de Tailleurs, et de Valets de chambre: et nous vous devons cette justice, pour la Frisure ou pour le Menuet, les François l'emportent sur toutes les autres Nations. Je ne comprens pas comment on aime si fort la Danse dans un Pays où l'on a si peu sujet de rire. N'est-il pas triste, par exemple, de ne cultiver vos Vignes que pour nous?"[980]
Regarding the French valets and femmes de chambre in London, the Abbé writes: "Il n'est pas étonnant que l'on trouve en Angleterre tant de Domestiques François. A Londres on se plaît à parler notre Langue, on copie nos usages, on imite nos mœurs: ils entretiennent du moins dans nos manières ceux qui les aiment: et les Anglois les payent à proportion de l'utilité qu'ils en retirent."[981] We are told that the French lackey was "as mischievous all the year as a London apprentice on Shrove Tuesday";[982] yet he was indispensable:
His Lordship's Valet must be bred in France,
Or else he is a clown without Pretence:
The English Blockheads are in dress so coarse,
They're fit for nothing but to rub a horse.
Her Ladyship's ill manner'd or ill bred,
Whose Woman Confident or Chamber Maid,
Did not in France suck in her first breath'd Air,
Or did not gain her education there.[983]
French cooks were also in great demand, and it was a point of gentility to dine at one of the French ordinaries. Thus Briske, in Shadwell's Humourists, is condemned as "a fellow that never wore a noble or polite garniture, or a white periwig, one that has not a bit of interest at Chatelin's, or ever ate a good fricacy, sup, or ragoust in his life"; for now, "like the French we dress, like Frenchmen eat." "Substantial beef" is "boil'd in vain," and "our boards are profaned with fricassee":[984]
Our cooks in dressing have no skill at all,
French cooks are only of the modish stamp.
Pepys did not care for the new French restaurants. At the most popular, Chatelin's,[985] he says, they serve a "damned base dinner at the charge of 8s. 6d." He preferred the old English ordinaries where English food was given a French name. Yet he admits that at the French houses the table is covered and the glasses clean, all in the French manner; and when he dined with his patrons of the Admiralty, he usually was given a "fine French dinner."[986]
As to the French dancing-master, he is a "very Paladin THE FRENCH TAILORof France when he comes into England once, where he has the Regimen of the Ladies leges and is the sole Pedagoge of their feet, teaching them the French Language, as well as the French Pace."[987] French music was also the vogue. We are told that during the reign of Charles II. "all musick affected by the beau mond ran in the ffrench way."[988] John Bannester, the first violin to the king, is said to have lost his post[989] for having upheld, within the hearing of His Majesty, that the English musicians were superior to the French. Soon after the Restoration, Charles on one occasion gave great umbrage to the English musicians by making them stop their performance and bidding the French music play instead.
In the same way the French tailor is "the King of Fashions and Emperor of the Mode, not onely in France, but most of its Neighboring Nations, and his Laws are received where the King of France's will not pass";[990] and thus the French
Now give us laws for pantalons,
The length of breeches and the gathers,
Port-cannons, periwigs and feathers.[991]
There was a French peddling woman at Court, Mlle. Le Boord, who "us'd to bring peticoates, and fanns and baubles out of France to the Ladys,"[992] and whose opinion had great weight. De Grammont won the favour of the English ladies by having French trinkets sent them from France. "Let the fashion be French, 'tis no matter what the cloth be."[993] Travellers from France were beset with questions as to the latest mode. Some devotees were said to receive weekly letters from France providing information on this subject.[994] At one moment Charles protested against the rage for French fashions by adopting a simple garment after the Persian style, which was first worn at Court on the 18th October 1666. Divers gentlemen went so far as to wager that His Majesty would not persist in this change; and when Louis XIV. retorted by ordering his pages to be attired in the same Persian garb, Charles withdrew. "It was a comely and manly attire," writes Evelyn, "too good to hold, it being impossible for us in good earnest to leave the Monsieurs' vanities long."[995]