THE SPANISH FIGARO.
CHAPTER XIX.
The Spanish Figaro—Mustachios—Whiskers—Beards—Bleeding—Heraldic Blood—Blue, Red, and Black Blood—Figaro’s Shop—The Baratero—Shaving and Toothdrawing.
FEW who love Don Quixote, will deem any notice on the Peninsular surgeon complete in which the barber is not mentioned, even be it in a postscript. Although the names of both these learned professors have long been nearly synonymous in Spain, the barber is much to be preferred, inasmuch as his cuts are less dangerous, and his conversation is more agreeable. He with the curate formed the quiet society of the Knight of La Mancha, as the apothecary and vicar used to make that of most of our country squires of England. Let, therefore, every Adonis of France, now bearded as a pard although young, nay, let each and all of our fair readers, albeit equally exempt from the pains and penalties of daily shaving, make instantly, on reaching sunny Seville, a pilgrimage to the shrine of San Figaro. His shop—apocryphal it is to be feared as other legendary localities—lies near the cathedral, and is a no less established lion than the house of Dulcinea is at Toboso, or the prison tower of Gil Blas is at Segovia. Such is the magic power of genius. Cervantes and Le Sage have given form, fixture, and local habitation to the airy nothings of their fancy’s creations, while Mozart and Rossini, by filling the world with melody, have bidden the banks of the Guadalquivir re-echo to their sweet inventions.
SPANISH MUSTACHIOS.
To those even who have no music in their souls, the movement from doctors to barbers is harmonious in a land where beards were long honoured as the type of valour and chivalry, and where shaving took the precedence of surgery; and even to this day, la tienda de barbero, the shop of the man of the razor, is better supplied than many a Spanish hospital both with patients and cutting instruments. One word first on the black whiskers of tawny Spain. These patillas, as they are now termed, must be distinguished from the ancient mustachio, the mostacho, a very classical but almost obsolete word, which the scholars of Salamanca have derived from μυστἁξ, the upper lip. Their present and usual name is Bigote, which is also of foreign etymology, being the Spanish corruption of the German oath bey gott, and formed under the following circumstances: for nicknames, which stick like burrs, often survive the history of their origin. The free-riding followers of Charles V., who wore these tremendous appendages of manhood, swore like troopers, and gave themselves infinite airs, to the more infinite disgust of their Spanish comrades, who have a tolerable good opinion of themselves, and a first-rate hatred of all their foreign allies. These strange mustachios caught their eyes, as the stranger sounds which proceeded from beneath them did their ears. Having a quick sense of the ridiculous, and a most Oriental and schoolboy knack at a nickname, they thereupon gave the sound to the substance, and called the redoubtable garnish of hair, bigotes. This process in the formation of phrases is familiar to philologists, who know that an essential part often is taken for the whole. For example, a hat, in common Spanish parlance, is equivalent to a grandee, as with us the woolsack is to a Lord Chancellor. It is natural that unscholastic soldiers, when dealing with languages which they do not understand, should fix on their enemies, as a term of reproach, those words which, from hearing used the most often, they imagine must constitute the foundation of the hostile grammar. Thus our troops called the Spaniards los Carajos, from their terrible oaths and terrible runnings away. So the clever French designated as les godams, those “stupid” fellows in red jackets who never could be made to know when they were beaten, but continued to make use of that significant phrase in reference to their victors, until they politely showed them the shortest way home over the Pyrenees.
THE BEARD.
The real Spanish mustachio, as worn by the real Don Whiskerandoses, men with shorter cloaks and purses than beards and rapiers, have long been cut off, like the pig-tails of our monarchs and cabinet ministers. Yet their merits are embalmed in metaphors more enduring than that masterpiece in bronze with which Mr. Wyatt, full of Phidias, has adorned King George’s back and Charing Cross. Thus hombre de mucho bigote, a man of much moustache, means, in Spanish, a personage of considerable pretension, a fine, liberal fellow, and anything, in short, but a bigot in wine, women, or theology. The Spanish original realities, like the pig-tails of Great Britain, have also been immortalised by fine art, and inimitably painted by Velazquez. Under his life-conferring brush they required no twisting with hot irons. Curling from very ire and martial instinct, they were called bigotes á la Fernandina, and their rapid growth was attributed to the eternal cannon smoke of the enemy, into which nothing could prevent their valorous wearers from poking their faces. This luxuriance has diminished in these degenerate times, unless Napier’s ‘History of the Peninsular War’ be, as the Spaniards say, written in a spirit of envy and jealousy against their heroic armies, which alone trampled on the invincible eagles of Austerlitz.
As among the Egyptian gods and priests, rank was indicated by the cut of the beard, so in Spain the military civil and clerical shapes were carefully defined. The Charley, or Imperial, as we term the little tuft in the middle of the under lip, a word by the way which is derivable either from our Charles or from his namesake emperor, was called in Spain El perrillo, “the little dog,” the terminating tail being omitted, which however becoming in the animal and bronzes, shocked Castilian euphuism.
THE BIGOTE.