“I am accused,” said he, “of sorcery, because Pudentilla espoused me after fifteen years of widowhood. But would it not be better to inquire why she consented to remain a widow so long? In support of the accusation of magic, you say that I instructed fishermen to bring me fish for unlawful purposes. Ought I to have employed a lawyer, a blacksmith, or a bird-catcher? I am accused of collecting vermiculated oysters, striped cockle-shells, and sea crayfish. But when Aristotle, Democritus, Theophrastus, and other naturalists made collections of Natural History, did you infer that it was for the confection of love-charms? A child accidentally fell down, in my presence, on my return home, and I am accused of sorcery! For the future, then, I presume I shall be bound to hold in leading strings all the children that approach me; and to prevent all little girls from stumbling, I must pick up the stones in the street, and do away with the threshold of my door, lest any one make a false step in entering my house. Pudentilla, it seems, informed her neighbours that I was a magician. She might have seen fit to call me a Consul; but would that have elevated me to the consular dignity?”
Having pleaded his own cause in this vein of pleasantry, the judges acquitted Apuleius, seeing clearly that so amiable and graceful a man needed no love-charm for the conquest of the old widow.
In those times, sovereigns as well as subjects were in the habit of purchasing love-charms! According to Suetonius, Cesonia administered a potion to her husband, Caligula, which increased both his madness and his cruelty. The death of the poet Lucretius was caused by a similar potion administered by his mistress, Lucilia. Eusebius mentions a Governor of Egypt, who died from the same cause, and there are innumerable instances of these potent decoctions producing insanity, as well as fatal enfeeblement of body. Ovid furnishes the true recipe for love: “Ut ameris, amabilis esto!” “To be loved, be amiable!” But such a charm being out of the reach of many, it seems easier to purchase cosmetics at the perfumers, which are about as effective in the creation of the tender passion as the magic potions of darker ages.
A pretension to youthful habits and appearance at an advanced period of life, is perhaps one of the most effectual methods of becoming distasteful and ridiculous.
Still, however, a suitable attention to the care and variations of the toilet, proves a great enhancement to beauty in its civilized state; nor can there be a more vulgar error than the dictum of the poet, proclaiming:
“Beauty unadorned, adorned the most.”
In the female bosom, the love of dress is an instinctive passion. Look at two children of the same age, a girl and a boy; the one will be seen to delight in feats of strength and agility; the other, as if in evidence of the desire of pleasing instinctive in the opposite sex, is sure to prefer a doll, a ribbon, or a pretty frock, in place of the drum or gun chosen by the boy. Both have intuitively adopted their different vocations. Both are ambitious to conquer by means suitable to their several sexes.
What prodigies of art have been effected in France in consequence of the love of dress generated in the fair sex by a desire to please; from the period when the fair Gauls attired themselves in a sheep-skin fastened at the throat with a thorn; but were not the less coquettish for this enforced simplicity.
At that period, their notions of coquetry consisted in having fanciful designs tattooed upon their persons; and instead of pearls and diamonds, by way of adornment, cockle-shells were suspended from their ears. Their sole cosmetic consisted in unguents, which we now abhor as characteristic of the Hottentots.
Can the present inhabitants of Paris be really descended from these savages? At that time all the elegance and refinement of dress, arising from the desire to please, were concentrated in Rome; nor have modern times raised the fair Parisians to a similar state of refinement. Juvenal relates that it was thought indecent by the Roman ladies to spit or make use of a handkerchief in public; and at Athens, the fair sex never presumed to leave their chambers when suffering from a cold. What would they have thought of the disgusting habits of the Parisian belles, who contaminate their handkerchiefs by taking snuff, and yet ornament them with embroideries!—But the ladies of the antique world scrupulously avoided all that could provoke disgust—an essential preliminary in the art of pleasing.