Why hide it then? The beauty which men bless
Gains on the whole by losing, don’t you know?
Caraccioli remarks that people used Muffs in winter just as much for elegance as for need. “The form varies continually,” he says; “to-day (1768) men carry small Muffs lined with down, and trimmed with black or grey satin.”
In 1720, women’s Muffs were very narrow and long; the crossed hands filled it exactly; afterwards they became wider, like those we may see on the hands of the pretty skaters of Lancret. A typical Muff of the epoch was the ermine Muff, fearfully large, which we find carried by the Venetian masks of the delicious Pietro Longhi, who seems to have wished to illustrate by his pictures the Memoires of Jacques Casanova of Seingalt. In the small engravings of the century relating to travelling, which show us the stoppages at the inn, or the packings in the public vehicles, we see everywhere the feminine Muff delicately pressed against their waists by the pretty adventuresses. Boucher’s skater, who passes like a gracious Parisian little figure over a background of a Dutch landscape, doubled up but valiant, appears to make a prow of her Muff, the better to cleave the sharp cold air. But in the intimacy of private life, in the eighteenth century as now, the Muff could lend a charm to genre paintings, and the manufacturers of prints might have composed many Little posts and Nests for love-letters, interpreting by their drawing what the author of the Dictionnaire des Amoureux wished to express, when at the word Muff he gives this piquant definition: A Letter-box, lined with white satin.
The most celebrated and the most delicious picture in which a Muff figures is assuredly that adorable painting known by the name of The Young Girl with the Muff, by Joshua Reynolds, which formed part of the beautiful collection of the Marquis of Hertford. Nothing is more delicate than this painting. That young English-woman seems rather to walk through the picture than remain fixed in it, so great, one might say, was the quickness with which the painter has caught that image in its passage with its movement of walking—the body is inclined a little forward, the head on one side; the woman’s bust, which stops at the Muff, is so fresh in its composition, so fine in its tonality, so radiant in its originality of design, that it would be enough almost by itself to establish the immortal reputation of Reynolds, who has put into his work a very quintessence of femininity, as an ideal of the most exquisite English loveliness, and also as a type, delicate and never to be forgotten, of a chilly beauty.
Nor must we forget the Portrait of Mrs. Siddons, painted by Gainsborough, in the charm of her twenty-ninth year, in 1784. This picture, which was exhibited at Manchester in 1857, is now in the National Gallery. The charming lady, dressed in a fresh striped blue and white robe, with a fawn-coloured shawl half falling from her shoulders, has on her head a large black felt hat, ornamented with feathers—one of those hats which have done more for the vulgarisation of the glory of Gainsborough than all his studies and portraits. Mrs. Siddons is seated, holding on her lap with her left hand a comfortable Muff of fox or Siberian wolf, of which she appears to caress the fur with her right hand, as if to show off the beauty and whiteness of her spindle-shaped fingers. The mistress of the works of a master who had, it is only right to say, the most ravishing face in the world to portray. But, without needing to have further recourse to the English school, have we not that luminous portrait of Madame Vigée Lebrun, in which the Muff, raised almost level with the head, spreads the shine of its hair of tawny gold like the head of a courtezan of Venice? That astonishing painting of the end of the eighteenth century appeared in its dazzling splendour, in the midst of the square saloon of the Museum of the Louvre, killing, by mere force of freshness and light, the magistral bituminous pictures of the beginning of the century, which are its near neighbours.
Under Louis XVI. the frenzy of the toilette reached its most acute crisis: fashions succeeded one another in a few years with so much rapidity that we can scarcely follow them; people sought to outstrip in everything rather than to refine, and the Muffs, carried by men and women alike, became enormous and exaggerated. Hurtaut, in his Dictionnaire de la Ville de Paris, article Modes, makes this strange remark in the year 1784, “A lady has been seen at the opera with a Muff of momentaneous agitation.”
The intellect loses itself in seeking the exact definition of this qualificative of momentaneous agitation!