Under Louis XV., in the eighteenth century, so full of the rustle of silk, so enchanting that I fear to stop on it in your company, lest I should never leave it, the wearing of Gloves quickly became an enormous luxury. All those fair coquettes, whom you have seen at their toilets, or their petit lever, after Nattier, Pater, or Moreau, surrounded by their “filles de modes,” caused a greater massacre of Gloves at the time of trying them on, than our richest worldlings of to-day. These Gloves were of kid, of thread, and of silk; the most celebrated came from Vendôme, from Blois, from Grenoble, and from Paris; they were generally made of white skin, wretchedly sewn, but the cut was extremely graceful, with its cuff falling from the wrist over the hand, and small ribbons and fine rosettes of carnation interlaced on this cuff.
Gloves sewn after the English fashion were highly appreciated. It became a proverb, that for a Glove to be good, three realms must have contributed to it: “Spain to prepare the skin and make it supple, France to cut it, and England to sew it.”
Caraccioli maintains that a woman of fashion, about the middle of the eighteenth century, would not dispense with changing her Gloves four or five times a day. “The petits-maîtres,” he adds, “never fail to put on, in the morning, Gloves of rose or jonquil, perfumed by the celebrated Dulac.” As to Mittens, the same observer of the century notices them as specially belonging to women. “Nevertheless,” he says, “in winter the manufacturers make furred Mittens, and men now wear them when they travel.”
Madame de Genlis has this curious observation in her Dictionary of Etiquette: “If you have anything to present to a princess, and have your Glove on, you must needs take it off.”
How many anecdotes, how many literary souvenirs, the Glove of the eighteenth century summons to the thought!
You remember, I am quite sure, that pretty chapter consecrated by Sterne, in his Sentimental Journey, to the beautiful Grisette who sold Gloves, into whose shop he entered to ask his way. The pretty Glove-seller coquets with the stranger, shows herself extremely complaisant, and the sentimental traveller, to prove his gratitude for her kindness, asks for some Gloves, and tries on several pairs without finding one to suit him. But he takes two or three pairs all the same before he goes.
The story leaves a fresh feature in the mind: an English artist has fixed it with much delicacy on a remarkable canvas, which figures in the National Gallery. The authors of the Vie Parisienne were surely inspired by it a little later in their joyous libretto, when they wrote the well-known couplets of the lady who sold Gloves and the Brazilian.
Permit me also to relate to you an anecdote, rather slight in texture, of which Duclos is the hero, and which has all the flavour of his roguish age:—
The author of Manners was bathing on the flowery borders of the Seine, and giving himself up to skilled hand-over-hand, when he suddenly heard piercing cries of distress. He rushes out of the water, runs up the bank without taking time to slip on his “indispensables,” and finds a young and charming woman, whose carriage had just been overturned in a rut. He hastens to beauty in tears, lying on the ground, and making a gracious bow, in his academic nudity, “Madam,” says he, in offering her his hand to assist her to rise, “pardon my want of Gloves.”