An engraving of the Encyclopédie presents us in the nick of time with a faithful reproduction of a shop of a furrier of the last century. Day penetrates through a large glass bow window; all round, on shelves, are ranged Muffs and different furs; two pleasing shopwomen offer their customers enormous Muffs of miniver, and a shop-boy beats with a rod one of those furred mantles which were sent “to be kept” during the summer, to preserve them from the mites. This engraving, a precious document which may be attributed to Cochin, recalls two charming little stories of Restif de la Bretonne in his Contemporaines du Commun: one entitled La Jolie Fourreuse, the other La Jolie Pelletière. Professions passed out of sight!
“Furs”—MM. de Goncourt wrote in a note of much study to their book La Femme au XVIIIe Siècle—“were a great luxury of Parisian ladies, at the time when the fashion was to arrive at the opera wrapt in the most superb and rarest, and to take them off little by little with coquettish art.” The reputation of the sable, the ermine, the miniver, the lynx, the otter, is indicated in the Étrennes Fourrées dédiées aux jolies Frileuses, Geneva, 1770. Muffs have quite a history, from those on which the furrier brought discredit, in causing one to be worn by the hangman on the execution day—these were probably Muffs à la Jésuite, muffs which were not of fur, and against which a pleasantry at the commencement of the century, A petition presented to the Pope by the master furriers, solicits excommunication—up to those of Angora goats’ hair, immense Muffs which reached to the ground, and to the little Muffs at the end of the century, baptized little barrels, as the Palatine was called cat. The fashion of sledges, then very widely spread, added to the fashion of furs. An etching of Caylus, after a drawing of Coypel, about the middle of the century, shows us in a sledge set on dolphins—one of those sledges which cost ten thousand crowns—a pretty woman dressed entirely in fur, her head-dress a small bonnet of fur with an egret, carried along in a sledge, which is driven by a coachman dressed like a Muscovite, and standing at the back. À propos of furs, the Palatine owes its fortune and its name to the Duchess of Orléans, mother of the Regent, known under the name of the Princess Palatine.
Palatines—which were made of fox, of marten, of miniver—were worn for a long time with Polonaises and Hongrelines. Roy, a French poet of the 18th century, who made acquaintance with the stick at different intervals—sent some bad verses to a lady on the subject of her blue palatine. The Almanach des Muses of 1772 has preserved them for us. Here they are:—
That charming colour wear,
The colour of the summer sky above,
The colour Venus sets on every Love,
Which makes the fairest faces yet more fair,
As Venus in her own sweet self can prove:
But the white place where falls the tufted bow
Is nought indeed but lovely nakedness;