According to an historian of the First Empire, some generals attending Bonaparte one day in his private room, found his big military Gloves and his little hat on a side-table. Actuated by curiosity, each one of them tried in turn the Glove and the hat; but it appears there was not a single hand which could force its entrance into those big Gloves, and upon those giants’ shoulders not a single head which could fill up the little hat.
Napoleon was, it is weil known, no less proud of his hand than Byron, who, his biographer tells us, had a hand so small, that it was out of all proportion with his face. Byron thought and wrote that nothing characterised birth more than the hand; it was, according to him, almost the sole index of aristocracy of blood.
Since the fifteenth century, we can trace in the museums of France, Holland, Italy, Spain, and Germany, the interest which painters of all schools have taken in the study of the hand, and, indeed, of the Glove. Van Dyck and Rubens were passed masters in this art, and Titian has left an admirable masterpiece in his Young Man with the Glove. Velasquez almost always makes his powerful models hold Gloves, nobly folded in their right hand. In Venetian paintings we see the Glove on the hands of the Doge, of his wife, of ambassadors, of senators, of residents, and even of merchants. The mere study of the Gloves in these portraits and these costumes would suffice for a long pamphlet, for we must consider the Glove in all classes of society and in all epochs, from the embroidered Gloves of the Doges to the special Gloves of the merchants, of the rectors of the university of Padua, and even of the monks of the brotherhood of the Cross, which were violet on a white ground, &c.
But it would be madness to endeavour to omit nothing in this monograph of the Glove, a tentative work, and an unpremeditated sketch of little pretension.
Have we not still to consider the stuffed fencing Glove, with the short shield of red leather, and the giant Glove which swells the fist of the boxers?—the ordinance Glove of the good Dumanet; that white cotton Glove which the brave trooper puts on so willingly on Sunday, coming out of barracks like a conquering hero? Is there not besides the Glove of the Cuirassier, with its large shield of buckskin, which this last man of iron places so gallantly on his hip when he is on express service?
The history of Gauntlets and of military Gloves from the time of the Middle Ages would make a mighty volume, like the ladies’ Glove and the work-people’s Mitten. The liturgical Glove, yet more important, is of three kinds: the pontifical Glove, which was worn by bishops and abbés; the Glove which simple priests had adopted for particular occasions; and lastly, the prelatic Glove. On pontifical Gloves alone Monseigneur X. Barbier de Montault has found means to write in the Bulletin Monumental, 1876-1877, nearly two hundred pages of closely packed text, in 8vo: Ab uno disce omnes. See, my amiable friend, I repeat it—see in what an inextricable archæological labyrinth I might have set you to wander, à propos of all these dear little Gloves, of which I had promised you a history, but about which it appears to me I am making only a lively chatter of whipped Glove. I should not have set on the table aught beyond that which lends grace to woman: Gloves on a champagne glass or in a shepherdess’s hat, roses and a love-letter half opened; such simple still life had assuredly better inspired my Muse than all the documents brought together and packed one on another, well calculated to frighten a mind which is by no means pleased with such barricades of notes and annotations. Ah, my fair friend, how right was Balzac, in his brilliant and profound Traité de la vie élégante, when he wrote the following lines, which I had not sufficiently considered before pledging my word in your society!