WELL, my dear friend, here I am, faithful as you see to my appointment; I am come deliberately to fulfil my promise, which I so imprudently gave on a certain day last season, upon a Breton strand, you remember, while contemplating one of your rosy little hands, which was whipping its sister with a long Swedish glove, in a sort of angry pet, and gave to you an appearance of wild and exquisite bluster?
How did you manage, O Enchantress, to induce me to give my loyal word that I would write for you the History of the Glove? How! . . . who can ever say? When a pair of pretty eyes envelop you, and bathe you with their radiance, when a smile puts honey into your heart, and a tiny little hand is stretched out with open palm, seeming to say, “Take me,” every kind of will melts quickly away, consent mounts delightedly to the lips, and we promise at once everything, before we know well what we are asked.
Ah, unhappy me! it is the Glove of Nessus which you have placed upon my hand! The History of the Glove! why, it is the history of the world; and I should be very ill-advised if I pretended avoir les Gants to be the first to tell that history, as ancient as it is universal.
Haunted by this debt of honour, contracted to please you, I went lately to see a learned old friend of mine, a venerable Benedictine—better than a well of science; an ocean of indulgence—to whom I exposed my foolish enterprise of the Glove and the Mitten.
Ah, my friend, I only wish you could have seen him all at once leap from his seat, look at me with compassion, examine me profoundly with his eye, and murmur three times in a tone of ineffable astonishment and sadness, as though he believed me mad—
“The Glove!—the Glove!!—the Glove!!!—
“ . . . And so it is the Glove,” he went on, when he had become a little calmer, “it is the history of this offensive and defensive ornament, of this object so complex, of which the origin is so obscure and so troublesome, it is a monograph of the Glove that you desire to write! . . . My dear child, allow me to believe that you have not reflected on what you have engaged yourself to do, let me think that you have brought more lightness than reason to the conception of this enterprise. The Glove!—Why, with the history of the Shoe, it is the most formidable work that a learned man could dare to dream of executing. Look,” he sighed, dragging forth a voluminous manuscript, “in the Bibliography of Words, a colossal work, which I have commenced, but, alas! shall never end, I see at the word GLOVE more than fifteen hundred different works, Latin, Greek, Italian, German, Spanish, English, and French, which treat of this matter, and even this is but the rudest sketch. We must consider the use of the Glove amongst the ancient Hebrews, the Babylonians, the Armenians, the Syrians, the Phœnicians, the Sidonians, the Parthians, the Lydians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, &c.
“It would be necessary to divide the work into different Books, subdivided into innumerable Chapters; thus for the etymology alone of the word Glove, in the different dialects, must be reserved a long notice of comparative philology; it would be necessary to determine if the Glove which was used by the young nude girls, who wrestled together in Lacedæmon, after Lycurgus had installed there his Lyceums and public games—if this Glove, I say, ought to be classed among the fighting mufflers or the leathern gauntlets—and how many matters besides!” And my dear old friend became still more and more excited, ever widening the question, as if, it seemed to me, it were a case of establishing a complete Encyclopedia. Diderot and d’Alembert would have grown pale before that imperturbable science, which showed mountains of folios to be cleared away, and unknown precipices to be sounded.