The question of complexion was seriously studied, the colour of the chin and cheeks being carefully suited to the gowns. Patches were lavishly indulged in in England and France, the eyebrows were blacked and even false, and China, Spain, and Portugal all contributed—for a consideration—rouges and white lead and wash balls, scented lard and lip salves, and toilet waters and soaps.
The fan was an indispensable complement to every gown, and its best conduct was an art which might well have been added to the scholastic curriculum for women, always supposing the like in existence. The fans were made of chicken skin and painted; and chicken skin also had the privilege, with lace and an embroidery of gold and silver, in making gloves and mittens for evening wear.
Tight-lacing was de rigueur, and it is indeed impossible to imagine any discomfort omitted from the toilet. I cannot picture conditions more entirely unpleasant than to glaze the face with paint and grease of red and black, to decorate it at intervals with devices of sticking plaster, to supply it with false eyebrows, and to mount on the head some pounds' weight of stuffed hair, while reducing the waist at least three inches below the natural size, expanding the hips with whalebone and hoops, compressing the feet into narrow shoes, and carefully studying every movement of the arm so as to hold a fan at a significant and becoming angle. And to add to all this, the dresses were of the stiffest brocades, decked with gold and silver embroideries and tinselled fringes, velvet and fur increasing the burden.
SOME STICKS.
The excessive elaboration of the hoods and the scarves and the aprons dangling with silver tassels and fringes was responsible for some criticism from Beau Nash, the autocrat of Bath, where he had established the strictest rules of dress and procedure, covering all delinquencies of conduct with a bearing of convincing dignity set in an atmosphere of punctilious etiquette. Goldsmith gives an instance of the despotic rule of Nash, and of the special liberties he arrogated to himself. "I have known him on a ball-night strip even the Duchess of Q." (the "Kitty beautiful," as the poet Prior called this Duchess of Queensberry), "and throw her apron at one of the hinder benches among the ladies' women, observing that none but Abigails appeared in white aprons."
Women had indeed to suffer in those days to attain what they were pleased to call the beautiful, and it is quite a relief to remember the moment when Marie Antoinette took a sudden caprice to appear without hoops in a soft satin gown with wide sleeves, which set the fashion in London as well as in France. For a short time only, however, such moderation ruled, and the hoops came back larger than ever in 1784, when the Duchess of Cumberland swept the floor in five yards of brocade, and a stomacher blazing stiffly with jewels.
The pastoral simplicity of the Petit Trianon should have really made more lasting impression than it did. For the Court ladies played at milkmaids under the rule of their farmer Queen, and churned butter with their own fair hands, and found a wide field for dainty disguises in rustic and ruinous simplicity. The peasant girls' dresses of stuffs and muslin were glorified by rich silks and muslin and challis decked with lace fichus and crowned with rose-coloured and be-ribboned straw hats, and embroidered holland and Persian cambric were affected economies no less expensive than the maize-coloured silk and striped green and white satin of avowed prodigality. The Trianon was a happy hunting-ground for flirtation, but that is another story, indeed a great many; but it served too as a pretext for innumerable new frocks, and the colour-prints of the time convincingly prove the dainty possibilities afforded by the artifice of simplicity allied to a nice taste in ribbons.
We have to go back to the days of Marie Antoinette for a practice which aroused some interest and amusement when a dressmaker in London last year was fired with a desire to revive it. Gowns were invested with the power to express special emotion, and Molière held the notion up to ridicule in his famous Précieuses. Long narrow shoes with the seam at the heel, whose socket was studded with jewels, were called venez-y-voir; and this suggestion of forwardness was again evident in a ribbon which went by the name of "marked attention." Other absurdities often quoted were the gown known as the "stifled sigh," trimmed with "superfluous regrets," and the cap of "assured conquest," and a muff of "momentary agitation."