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costly lace and ribbons by the yard. This in time subsided into the most elegant of courtdresses, though too effeminate in its character for any but aristocratic idlers. Such was the costume of the perfumed gallants who crowded the ante-chambers of Pompadour and Dubarray. Intrigue was the business of their lives; they looked, acted, studied, and above all dressed with the paramount view of captivating the fairer sex. Dressing therefore was a laborious and protracted operation, which demanded all the powers of the mind. It was well if the gallant who commenced it as soon as he rose from his couch at noon, finished his labor of love by three o'clock. The hands, withdrawn from the night-gloves, must be soaked for a long time in lotions and washes, to remove any discoloration or roughness; the cheeks were to be tinted with carminatives to give a bloom to the complexion, palid from last night's debauch; every envious pimple must be hidden by a patch; the clothes must be perfumed, the linen powdered to overcome the smell of soap. The proper tying of the cravat was the great labor of the day; this performed, the wig and hat properly adjusted, the most captivating attitudes and graces carefully studied before the mirror, and the French noble of the few years before the Revolution was prepared for the VOL. IX.-No. 54.-3B

"L'AGIOTEOR," 1795.

conquests of the day. But before this elaborate costume was finally swept away by the Revolution, there was a brief episode of simplicity. Franklin made his appearance at court in a suit of sober brown. All heads were turned. Lace and embroidery and powdered curls were discarded. Straight brown coats and straight cut hair became the mode of the moment.

The habit succeeding this was based upon the old English frock-coat, with its ample and awkward folds, which by some unaccountable freak became all at once the rage at Paris. The Duke de Lauroquais used to say that the English frockcoat gave a mortal wound to the costume of the French noblesse, which speedily degenerated, with its brocade and gay colors, into a disguise for the carnival or a dress for a masquerade ball; while the new costume, which was half adopted by the ladies, became in 1787 as we see it in the cut which we present of the fashions of that year.

Black, which heretofore had been the obscure color confined to lawyers, authors, and all those who then formed the connecting link between the vulgar and the fashionable world, now suddenly

took a start, and became the "ne plus ultra" of gentility. The pre-eminence then attained by it for gentlemen has been retained to this day, while colors are banished to the street or masquerades. At this time, too, that abomination of abominations for the covering of the head, known as the modern hat, began to assume its present hideous shape, for which the transformer deserves the pains of decapitation. Expensive lace became the passion of the dandies, who piqued themselves upon having a different variety for each season.

It was the fashion also for gentlemen to wear much costly jewelry, as another mode of distinguishing themselves from the plebeian crowd. In 1780 was introduced the singularity of wearing two watches at once, burdened with immense chains. This was also adopted by the ladies. The custom now appears ridiculous, but in reality it is no more so than the present one of loading a vest with a huge bundle of nondescript jewelry-coral and

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CARICATURE, 1778.

bone arms, legs, and death's-heads-under the name of charms. The Marshal Richelieu was one of the first to carry two watches. One day a caller, by some mischance, threw them both on the floor. He began to overwhelm the Marshal with excuses. "Make yourself easy," replied the veteran of politeness, "I never saw them go so well together before."

The ladies, not to be outdone in extravagance by their lords, turned their attention to their hair, and invented the strangest coiffures. The Roman ladies, in their rage for red perukes, frequently sacrificed their own raven locks altogether, and accumulated several hundred of different shades in a short time. The passion of the French was for white. A caricature of 1778 gives an idea of the height to which they carried their new fashion, which, after all, was not much above the truth.

The chronicles of the day are filled with scandalous stories of the relations

HEAD-DRESS, 1785.

between the grand dames and the artists thus admitted to the solitude and privacy of their bedchambers. The art of the coiffeurs became a great one in the eyes of fashion. A work on the subject was published at eight dollars the volume. The professors became rich and distinguished. The handsome Leonard, who was the coiffeur of the Queen, Maria Antoinette, succeeded in using upward of fourteen yards of gauze upon a single head, which acquired for him a European

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renown.

The turbans and bonnets of this epoch were equally extravagant. The coiffures of the ladies became so high that the face seemed to be in the middle of their bodies; and the director of the Opera was compelled to make a rule that no lady with a head-dress above a certain height should be admitted into the amphitheatre, because the spectators were unable on account of them to see the stage. If the ladies are induced to class these specimens as "frights," let them consider that in their day they were considered equally as becoming as the present styles.

It was in vain that the caricaturists leveled their weapons at these towering head-dresses. 66 Top-knots" would not "come down." They waxed higher and higher, threatening to rival the tower of Babel; until the Queen was attacked by a violent illness which occasioned the loss of the flaxen locks that had called forth the genius of the coiffeurs. At once down went the towering piles, like castles in the clouds. Every lady at court appeared

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with a flat head. The next great change in ladies head gear was wrought by a philosopher and poet. St. Pierre put forth his Paul et Virginie, and all Paris went mad for simplicity and nature. He attired his heroine in simple white muslin with a hat of plain straw. The vol

atile Parisiennes were captivated. Silks and satins, powder and pomatum vanished as if by magic, and from queen to waiting-maid nobody appeared except in white muslins and straw hats.

Geography was ransacked to find names for these remarkable superstructures for the head. Thus there were bonnets à la Turke, à la Autriche, and, even as early as 1785, America was honored in having one style, called à la Philadelphie; finally, the wits or the geographical knowledge of the milliners being exhausted, in despair they christened their last invention the "anonymous bonnet."

Paris, in 1851, no sooner set eyes on the would-be American fashion of Bloomerism, with its short skirts and trowsered legs, than it completely extinguished it by one blast of its all-powerful ridicule. Yet, as long ago as 1772, it had adopted a mode, compounded from the Polonaise, equally as open to objection, so far as scantiness of petticoats was concerned, with the additions of heels several inches

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BONNET, 1786.

in height, and walking-sticks which might easily be mistaken for boarding-pikes.

The extravagance and luxury of the fashion

ables of both sexes immediately preceding the Revolution, which was destined to engulf them and their fortunes, were such as almost to palliate the excesses of the people who had so long and patiently borne with the heartlessness and vices of the aristocracy. There was a rivalry among the great lords and bankers as to who should ruin themselves soonest for the favorite actresses of the day. Then courtesans rode in their carriages made with panels of porcelain, silver spokes, drawn by six horses, and attended by mounted servants in livery. Even royalty was scandalized and outdone by the magnificence of their equipages, hotels, and houses of pleasure. The nobles, as if with a presentiment of their coming fate, hastened to pour into the laps of their mistresses their entire fortunes, seeking to drown in refined debauchery the thunder of the storm that already began to roll over their heads.

Among the follies which the fashions of this date presented was the confusion which arose between male and female attire. Men borrowed the laces, ruffles, belts, jewelry, and finery of the | women. They, in revenge, took the coats, vests, open shirts, cravats, powdered queues, canes, and even cloth frock-coats of the men. The fashion

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of the male for one month was frequently adopted | shoes and coarse coats, and in all ways endeavfor the mode of the female for the next. Sexual proprieties in dress were utterly confounded, and this medley of apparel extended in some degree to habits and pursuits. The ladies seized upon the studies and occupations of men. Many of their conquests they have retained to this day, as any one conversant with Paris can perceive.

In the midst of this extravagance came the Revolution. The etiquette and magnificence of the old society disappeared in the vortex of the social whirlpool. Diamonds and lace, flowers and plumes, embroidered coats and satin robes, all the luxurious and costly creations of past fashion, sunk more rapidly than they arose. Fortunes were annihilated in a day. Royalty even put on plebeian shoes, mounted the coarse cap of the worker, and shouted the hollow cry of "Egalité!" Universal brotherhood was on the lips of men, and universal hate in their hearts. Religion and decency fled in affright. It was the advent of sans-culottism. For a while, coarseness and vulgarity, under the garbs of equality and fraternity, reigned triumphant. For a time they took the form of Anglo-mania. This was before the advent of the "classical" era. The clubbists carried enormous cudgels, wore thick

ored to transform themselves into blackguards, with the most complete success. The stones of the Bastile were made up into patriotic breastpins for the bosoms of beauty. Copper buckles replaced the gold and silver of former years. Wealth and fashion, once so inordinately displayed, were now the sure tokens of destruction. Safety was only in abject humility and conspicuous poverty. But French nature, though it could endure the tyranny of political Jacobinism, was restless under the extinction of fashion and obliteration of clean breeches. It soon rebelled, discarding all past inventions, struck out new and tenfold more ridiculous costumes than before. The fashion-plates of that time reveal this rebellion against sans-culottism in a thousand comical ways. A view of the rendezvous of the fashionable world, the garden of the famous "Palais Royal," as it existed in 1792, would better illustrate the "cut" of the day than pages of description. The different political parties displayed their mutual hatred, not so much in words which they dared not utter, as in the silent but mocking eloquence of dress. The popular tri-colors and cut and unpowdered hair remained, however, in the ascendency. But neither the horrors of the scaf

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