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!
“The learned man, or the elegant man of the world, who would search out in every epoch the costumes of a people, would compile the most interesting history and the most rationally true. . . . . To ask the origin of shoes, of alms-purses, of hoods, of the cockade, of hoop-petticoats, of farthingales, of Gloves, of masks, is to drag a modilogist into the frightful maze of sumptuary laws, and upon all the battlefields, where civilisation has triumphed over the gross manners imported into Europe by the barbarism of the Middle Ages.
“Things futile in appearance,” continues the author of the Théorie de la démarche, “represent either ideas or interests—whether it be bust, or foot, or head”—he might have said, above all, or hand—“you will ever see a social progress, a retrograde system, or some desperate struggle formulating itself by the assistance of some part or other of the dress. Now the shoe announces a privilege, now the hat signals a revolution—a piece of embroidery, a scarf, or some ornament of straw, is the sign of a party. Why should the toilet be then always the most eloquent of styles, if it was not really the whole man, the man with his political opinions, the man with the text of his existence, the hieroglyphic man? To-day Vestignomy has become almost a branch of the art created by Gall and Lavater.”
I am overwhelmed, O my indulgent friend! I feel that I have been far inferior to my task, and I fear I have not had that charming art of saying nothing which often says so many things. I have neglected to show you the Glove in princely Inventaires, in the old chronicles, and in the delightful tales of Boccaccio, of the Queen of Navarre, of Straparole, of Bonaventure Desperriers, and even in Brantôme, who has written a little story, full of old French esprit, on a Glove found in the bed of a fashionable lady. I had a good opportunity of showing you the anecdotic Glove of ever so many romances and memoirs from Le Petit Jehan de Saintre up to Casanova the Venetian, going through l’ Histoire amoureuse des Gaules.
But the natural and the unpremeditated is also a French quality, of which we must sometimes allow the grace, even in recognising its defects. I left the history of the Glove, I believe, in 1840; and I do not suppose that I have painted for you all the little cuffs, festoons, ruches, notchings, indentations, which adorned the fastenings of the town Gloves of our elegant ladies, nor the long black mittens which accompanied the blonde bodices, of which in those modest times people were madly fond. It is of little consequence for me to follow the fashions from 1840 to the present day: one cannot be a woman and remain ignorant of these different variations of a fashion of which all the specimens return periodically to reconquer a second of celebrity. Open-worked Gloves of Chinese silk, Spanish Gloves, Beaver Gloves, Swedish Gloves, glacé kid Gloves, musketeers’ Gloves, Colombine, with cuffs—what do I say?—the qualifications are innumerable; they change still more than the fashion, for the epithet gives a springtide and deceives the customer—a fortiori would it deceive the Gantuographer, if you will allow me this hideous neologism.
That which I have not been able to accomplish, that which you have not demanded of me, that which nevertheless would have interested you far more than this sleepy talk, is the Physiology of the Glove, with this epigraph taken from an anonymous but witty author—“The style is the man; the Glove is the woman; the style sometimes deceives, but the Glove never.”
I am launched, don’t you see, into theories historic, philosophic, and, above all, physiognomic, in a study altogether beside the mark?
Allow, my sweet and somnolent one, that if you had permitted me at first to take this part (which for my slight notice was assuredly better), I should have been less clumsily stiff, less dull above all, less pretentious besides; albeit I make no other pretension here than to do your pleasure. You have thrown me the Glove on the confines of history; it is thence that I have raised it with more effeminancy than swagger.
I could have wished that fancy might have dictated to history; but, in the present case, it is the most that has been done, if history has succeeded in warming the amiable fancy, which has not taken Gloves to make us villainously sulky with each other.