Chapter III: Part 3

Hawking existed even under Louis XIII., but it was no longer the grand and splendid epoch of this aristocratic sport, so profoundly interesting. In one of his ancient legends, André le Chapelain, of whom Stendhal wrote a short biographical notice, speaks of a sparrow-hawk, to gain which the magic Glove was necessary. This Glove could only be obtained by a victory in the lists over two of the most formidable champions of Christendom. It was suspended to a golden column, and very carefully guarded. But when the knight had by his skill gained the Glove, he saw the beautiful sparrow-hawk so much desired swoop down immediately upon his fist.

Up to the age of Louis XIV., the skin Glove was destined rather for the use of men, and it was only under this Prince that Gloves mounting a long way up the arm, and long Mittens of silk netting to set off the hands of women, were generally adopted by them.

Gloves /à l'occasion/, /à la Cadenet/, /à la Phyllis/, /à la Frangipane/, /à la Néroli/, Gloves /of the last cut/ worn awhile by the /Précieuses/, ceased to be fashionable about 1680. The custom, of which Tallemant speaks, of presenting ladies, after the banquet, with basins of Spanish Gloves, was only vulgarised in passing from the Court to the town.

Dangeau, in his /Memoirs/, has written a chapter on the /Etiquette of Gloves and the Ceremonial of Mittens/. I refer you to it without ceremony.

Under Louis XV., in the eighteenth century, so full of the rustle of silk, so enchanting that I fear to stop on it in your company, lest I should never leave it, the wearing of Gloves quickly became an enormous luxury. All those fair coquettes, whom you have seen at their toilets, or their /petit lever/, after Nattier, Pater, or Moreau, surrounded by their "/filles de modes/," caused a greater massacre of Gloves at the time of trying them on, than our richest worldlings of to-day. These Gloves were of kid, of thread, and of silk; the most celebrated came from Vendôme, from Blois, from Grenoble, and from Paris; they were generally made of white skin, wretchedly sewn, but the cut was extremely graceful, with its cuff falling from the wrist over the hand, and small ribbons and fine rosettes of carnation interlaced on this cuff.

Gloves sewn after the English fashion were highly appreciated. It became a proverb, that for a Glove to be good, three realms must have contributed to it: "Spain to prepare the skin and make it supple, France to cut it, and England to sew it."

Caraccioli maintains that a woman of fashion, about the middle of the eighteenth century, would not dispense with changing her Gloves four or five times a day. "The /petits-maîtres/," he adds, "never fail to put on, in the morning, Gloves of rose or /jonquil/, perfumed by the celebrated Dulac." As to Mittens, the same observer of the century notices them as specially belonging to women. "Nevertheless," he says, "in winter the manufacturers make furred Mittens, and men now wear them when they travel."

Madame de Genlis has this curious observation in her /Dictionary of Etiquette/: "If you have anything to present to a princess, and have your Glove on, you must needs take it off."

How many anecdotes, how many literary souvenirs, the Glove of the eighteenth century summons to the thought!

You remember, I am quite sure, that pretty chapter consecrated by Sterne, in his /Sentimental Journey/, to the beautiful Grisette who sold Gloves, into whose shop he entered to ask his way. The pretty Glove-seller coquets with the stranger, shows herself extremely complaisant, and the sentimental traveller, to prove his gratitude for her kindness, asks for some Gloves, and tries on several pairs without finding one to suit him. But he takes two or three pairs all the same before he goes.

The story leaves a fresh feature in the mind: an English artist has fixed it with much delicacy on a remarkable canvas, which figures in the National Gallery. The authors of the /Vie Parisienne/ were surely inspired by it a little later in their joyous libretto, when they wrote the well-known couplets of the lady who sold Gloves and the Brazilian.

Permit me also to relate to you an anecdote, rather slight in texture, of which Duclos is the hero, and which has all the flavour of his roguish age:--

The author of /Manners/ was bathing on the flowery borders of the Seine, and giving himself up to skilled /hand-over-hand/, when he suddenly heard piercing cries of distress. He rushes out of the water, runs up the bank without taking time to slip on his "indispensables," and finds a young and charming woman, whose carriage had just been overturned in a rut. He hastens to beauty in tears, lying on the ground, and making a gracious bow, in his academic nudity, "Madam," says he, in offering her his hand to assist her to rise, "pardon my want of Gloves."

Here we have at once the expression of a scoffing sceptic, and a giddy philosopher, full of a particular charm. Do not believe, my gentle friend, that if I remain in your company so short a time in the beginning of the eighteenth century--the only one which has, you cannot deny it, all its perfumed quintessence--do not believe that I intend to linger in the Revolution, and conduct you to the house of Mademoiselle Lange, Madame Talien, Madame Récamier, and all the fashionable drawing-rooms of the First Republic, the Directory, the Consulate, and the Empire; to take ceremoniously the hand of the marvellous Beauties, the Nymphs, and Muses of those troubled times, in order the better to show you what extravagant Gloves, what prodigious Mittens, were then worn. The /Ladies' Journal/, and all the small journals of fashion, will surely teach you more about the Gloves worn by these worldly Calypsos and Eucharises than six hundred monotonous pages of varied descriptions. There is no Museum, however, preserving the objects of art which the Revolution marked deeply with its seal; and this fact will make me insist on a model of a special Glove, destined for a representative of the people despatched to the army, of which an erudite archæologist of the Revolution, and at the same time a remarkable humourist, Champfleury, has been good enough to communicate to me a design. This Glove of doe-skin, manufactured according to order, and broidered with arabesques about the slopings of the thumb, bears on the back of the hand a vignette in the form of a seal, which represents Liberty holding in her hand the pike, the Phrygian cap, and the scales of justice--a Liberty, you will say, by no means at liberty . . . . in her movements:--on the right is crouched a lion, the sign of force; on the left a cat, a sign of independence.

I will not lose my time in paraphrasing for you this symbolic vignette; and, with a long historic stride, I will conduct you into the quietude of some chateau, under the Restoration, and, in the evening twilight, to the terrace before a great park. I will there show you two lovers warbling a serenade--the timid young girl touching a guitar, the young man deeply moved, putting a world of passion into his baritone voice. On the hands of the singer, behold, pearly grey gloves fastening with a single button; on the dainty little fingers supporting the guitar, examine those Mittens of black silk lace, open worked, like those which, according to tradition, are worn by the heroine of that charming comedy, the /Marriageable Maid/.

There rises on my lips a song of the time which the /Almanac of the Muses/ has bequeathed us, to the air of /The Little Sailor/. It will perhaps add a spice of interest to my story. "Now, listen, my friend," as they used to say in the noble ages of chivalry. Title of the song: /The Gloves/.

I love the Glove, that covers quite
The rounded arm it rests upon;
I take it off, with what delight,
With what delight I put it on!
If true it is through mystery,
A lover's bliss will higher move,
How dear that little hand should be
Which hides itself beneath a Glove!

But there's another Glove, whose use
Will every swaggerer displease;
A Glove correcting all abuse,
Which brings the braggart to his knees;
How many boasting folk I've known,
Who would, and wisely, rather prove
A flight from out the window thrown,
Than see before them that same Glove!

The Gloves are useful when we seek
The fair, the great ones, as we know;
When unto those with Gloves we speak,
Easy at once their favours grow.
They for intriguers wealth have won,
No fools their uses are above;
Of what another man has done
They boast, and give themselves the Glove.

One last couplet, I pray you, and the authoress, Madame Perrier, will bow herself out:--

The Gloveless man can ne'er afford
To dance, no step he makes with grace;
The servant wishes that his lord
Should put on Gloves in many a case.
When the police are wide awake,
To cheat those eyes they hardly love,
How many thieves will wisely take
The greatest care to wear the Glove?

The song is not so bad, truly; and if the Muse gloves the author a little tightly, the tone of his strophes is none the less strictly respectable and proper.

Under Louis XVIII. and Charles X. long Gloves were very costly; still, no coquette hesitated to change them every day, for it was necessary for them to be of extreme freshness of colour, which was either buff, gridelin, or white. Some years later, the fashion tended to maize, straw, or nut colour for the evening and morning toilet, and to palisander, burnt bread, cedar, fawn, for afternoon visits. Yellow Gloves had an infinite scale of tones, from a soft and delicate unbleached lawn colour to the glaring yellow of a stage-coach. White doe-skin was only used by men when riding.

It was about this epoch, if I mistake not, that the denunciation of /Gant jaune/ (yellow glove) became synonymous with /petit-maître/ (dandy). In London, the disciples of Brummel--of the most refined elegance--constituted a society, and formed the Club of the /Fringed Glove/. This club no longer existed doubtless in 1839, when d'Orsay established thus despotically the rules of the perfect gentleman:

"An English gentleman of fashion," said he, "ought to use six pair of Gloves a day:

"In the morning to drive a britzska to the hunt: Gloves of reindeer.

"At the hunt, to follow a fox: Gloves of shammy leather.

"To return to London in a Tilbury, after a drive at Richmond in the morning: Gloves of beaver.

"To go later for a walk in Hyde Park, or to conduct a lady to pay her visits or make her purchases in London, and /to offer her your hand in descending from the carriage/: coloured kid Gloves braided.

"To go to a dinner-party: yellow dog's skin Gloves--and in the evening for a ball or rout: Gloves of white lamb-skin embroidered with silk."

What odious tyranny is so exacting a fashion! And how sensible was Balzac when he wrote: "Dandyism is a heresy of fashion; in making himself a dandy, a man becomes a piece of furniture of the boudoir, an extremely ingenious puppet, which can pose on a horse, or on a sofa, which sucks habitually the end of a walking-stick, but a reasonable being--never!"

It is, however, with some dandy of the school of Rubempré and Rastignac, that often, on quitting the ball, an author shows us a romantic young lady in love, whose jealousy gnaws at her heart, who re-reads the letters of old times, and with wandering looks, like one overwhelmed, nervously tearing with her teeth a finger of her Glove, sadly dreams that the lover who is no longer all, is nothing, and that the moralist much deceived himself who wrote: "Woman is a charming creature, who puts off her love as easily as her Glove."

How many things are there, look you, in a Glove!

In the novel /The Lion in Love/ of Frédéric Soulié, Léonce signs the register of marriages at the mayoralty with a gloved hand; and when Lise's turn comes, the young girl stops, saying in a voice tinged with just a touch of mockery, "Pardon me, let me remove my Glove."

"Léonce understood," then says the author, "that he had signed with his gloved hand." Sign an act of marriage with a Glove! Léonce meditated a little, and said to himself: "These people have certain delicacies. What difference makes a Glove more or less to the holiness of an oath, or the signature of a document? Nothing assuredly; and yet it seems that there is more sincerity in a naked hand, which affixes the signature of a man in testimony of the truth. It is one of those imperceptible sentiments of which we are unable to give an exact account, but which nevertheless exist."

The fact is, that the Glove is not really, as has been said, a tyrant of which the hand is the slave, but quite the contrary--it is the hand's servant; and with the hand, as Montaigne wrote, "We request, promise, call, dismiss, menace, pray, supplicate, deny, refuse, interrogate, admire, number, confess, repent, fear, shame, double, instruct, command, incite, encourage, swear, witness, accuse, condemn, absolve, injure, contemn, distrust, track, flatter, applaud, bless, humiliate, mock, reconcile, recommend, exalt, feast, rejoice, complain, sadden, discomfort, despair, astonish, write, suppress," &c.

I stop out of breath: verbs of every kind may pass into the list.

With the Egyptians, the hand was a symbol of force; with the Romans, a symbol of fidelity. We please ourselves in clothing the occult powers, such as Time, Nature, Destiny, with a human hand: the hand of Time overthrows empires, and impresses wrinkles on our brows; the hand of Nature is prodigal to us of gifts, which are ravished from us by the hand of Death; the hand of Destiny or of Providence, in fine, conducts us across the paths of life.

Old stereotyped language, which we use, and shall use always. Are we not, as Saint Evremond said, in the hands of love, as the balls in the hands of tennis-players--and the first happiness which love can give, is it not, according to Stendhal--and all the truly sensitive--the first pressure of the hand of the woman we love?

Our ancestors swore by the hand, and read in the hand the mysteries of the future. On the day of coronation, the hand of justice was borne before the kings; the hand is used in salutation; we ask for the /hand/ of the lady we wish to espouse in lawful marriage; we wash our hands, like Pontius Pilate, of faults which we could not help committing; and if I were to have to make for you the panegyric of this organ, I should have, like Scheherazade, to put off the end of my discourse every day till the morrow. Sir Charles Bell, in his book, /The Hand: Its Mechanism, etc./, has given a synthesis of all I could possibly add, and has proved that the human hand is so admirably formed, possesses a sensibility so exquisite, that sensibility governs with so much precision all its movements, it answers so instantaneously to the impulses of the will, that one might be tempted to believe that it is itself its seat. All its actions are so energetic, so free, and withal so delicate, that it appears to have an instinct apart; and neither its complication as an instrument is ever dreamt of, nor the relations which subject it to the mind. We avail ourselves of the service of the hand, as we perform the act of respiration, without thinking of it; and we have lost all remembrance of its first feeble efforts, as of the slow exercise which has brought it to perfection.

The hand, in a word, is the most perfect instrument given by God to man; but I ought not to forget, my fair friend, that poets seldom wear gloves, and philosophers never; and that, philosophising as I am, I remain outside the Glove, and, above all, appear to forget that axiom of Fontenelle: Had we our hand full of authenticated facts or truths, we should but half open it, and that after a feeble fashion.

The Glove is worthy of entering into the legend of a fairy tale, and remaining there always, as the slipper has entered into the poetry even of fable, with the theme of /Cinderella/. An ancient King of France was indeed in love all his life with an unknown woman, only from having seen her Glove in the midst of a masked ball given to his court. Could it not easily be conceived according to the approximative aphorism, "Show me your Glove, I will tell you who you are." At the opera ball, in the surge of masks and of dominoes, in the midst of the comings and goings on that staircase so exalted, it needs but a Glove imprisoning a little hand to allure at once the passion of a man of delicacy--a long white Glove lovingly glued to a hand divinely small, a fine delicate wrist, and the exquisite roundness of the forearm. This is enough to transport a lover of the fair sex. The Glove appears not only in all festivals where grace and beauty preside; it is found in all the rudeness and clumsiness of its origin at the Poles, among the Norwegians, the Laps, and the Fins, who wear huge Gloves of wool in summer, and thick Gloves of reindeer skin, with the hair outside, in winter.

Defended by these Gloves, they sometimes sally bravely from their huts, in spite of the cruel frosts, to kill the white bear and the seal, just as the dramatic engravings which illustrate our stories of voyages to the North Pole represent them to us.

But methinks your eye is asking me in disquietude about two little bound books which I have in my reach. Reassure yourself, these are not recitals of tourists, which are for painting us the manners of the inhabitants of Karasjok or of the Lofoten Isles: I will read to you at once, without allowing you to languish any longer, their titles. Upon one of these works, see for yourself /Collection of the Best Riddles of the Time/, composed on divers serious and sprightly subjects by Colletet; on the other, /Collection of Riddles of the Time/, by the Abbé Cotin. You already divine that I intend to act no traitor's part towards you, and that I am going to read you some old charades in verse upon Gloves:

The first riddle--/énigme/ has been masculine in French at least since the seventeenth century, in despite of its profound femininity--the first riddle, in obscure and ambiguous terms, indicates that the Glove, after having been the natural covering of a rustic animal, serves to-day as an artificial covering for an animal more refined: man!

We're two or ten, and to a body wed,
We once a thing of breathing life were over;
Like it we lived, and now, although we're dead,
Another life more excellent we cover.

This quatrain riddle is by François Colletet, that poor poet up to his neck in mud. Listen now to Cotin--the Trissotin of Molière--in this singular sextain:--

With mortal flesh our five soft mouths we fill,
And in the winter to repletion feed;
If one of us be lost, the world's agreed
To treat the rest of us exceeding ill;
But if we all remain together, then
We do almost all that is done by men.

Mediocre, isn't it; tortured, bombastic, gross, all at once? There is nothing here to make us fall into an ecstasy, and repeat to satiety, as some highly refined courtiers used to do, "Ah, with what congruity of terms are these thoughts expressed!"

I shall abandon the riddles at once. These two specimens are enough. Another point:

Many physiologists affirm that great warriors have been remarkable for a beautiful hand, which they loved perhaps to adorn with the most delicate gloves. They instance Cyrus, Alexander, Cæsar, Charlemagne, and Napoleon.

According to an historian of the First Empire, some generals attending Bonaparte one day in his private room, found his big military Gloves and his little hat on a side-table. Actuated by curiosity, each one of them tried in turn the Glove and the hat; but it appears there was not a single hand which could force its entrance into those big Gloves, and upon those giants' shoulders not a single head which could fill up the little hat.

Napoleon was, it is weil known, no less proud of his hand than Byron, who, his biographer tells us, had a hand so small, that it was out of all proportion with his face. Byron thought and wrote that nothing characterised birth more than the hand; it was, according to him, almost the sole index of aristocracy of blood.

Since the fifteenth century, we can trace in the museums of France, Holland, Italy, Spain, and Germany, the interest which painters of all schools have taken in the study of the hand, and, indeed, of the Glove. Van Dyck and Rubens were passed masters in this art, and Titian has left an admirable masterpiece in his /Young Man with the Glove/. Velasquez almost always makes his powerful models hold Gloves, nobly folded in their right hand. In Venetian paintings we see the Glove on the hands of the Doge, of his wife, of ambassadors, of senators, of residents, and even of merchants. The mere study of the Gloves in these portraits and these costumes would suffice for a long pamphlet, for we must consider the Glove in all classes of society and in all epochs, from the embroidered Gloves of the Doges to the special Gloves of the merchants, of the rectors of the university of Padua, and even of the monks of the brotherhood of the Cross, which were violet on a white ground, &c.

But it would be madness to endeavour to omit nothing in this monograph of the Glove, a tentative work, and an unpremeditated sketch of little pretension.

Have we not still to consider the stuffed fencing Glove, with the short shield of red leather, and the giant Glove which swells the fist of the boxers?--the ordinance Glove of the good Dumanet; that white cotton Glove which the brave trooper puts on so willingly on Sunday, coming out of barracks like a conquering hero? Is there not besides the Glove of the Cuirassier, with its large shield of buckskin, which this last man of iron places so gallantly on his hip when he is on express service?

The history of Gauntlets and of military Gloves from the time of the Middle Ages would make a mighty volume, like the ladies' Glove and the work-people's Mitten. The liturgical Glove, yet more important, is of three kinds: the /pontifical Glove/, which was worn by bishops and abbés; the Glove which simple priests had adopted for particular occasions; and lastly, the /prelatic/ /Glove/. On /pontifical Gloves/ alone Monseigneur X. Barbier de Montault has found means to write in the /Bulletin Monumental/, 1876-1877, nearly two hundred pages of closely packed text, in 8vo: /Ab uno disce omnes/. See, my amiable friend, I repeat it--see in what an inextricable archæological labyrinth I might have set you to wander, /à propos/ of all these dear little Gloves, of which I had promised you a history, but about which it appears to me I am making only a lively chatter of whipped Glove. I should not have set on the table aught beyond that which lends grace to woman: Gloves on a champagne glass or in a shepherdess's hat, roses and a love-letter half opened; such simple still life had assuredly better inspired my Muse than all the documents brought together and packed one on another, well calculated to frighten a mind which is by no means pleased with such barricades of notes and annotations. Ah, my fair friend, how right was Balzac, in his brilliant and profound /Traité de la vie élégante/, when he wrote the following lines, which I had not sufficiently considered before pledging my word in your society!

"The learned man, or the elegant man of the world, who would search out in every epoch the costumes of a people, would compile the most interesting history and the most rationally true. . . . . To ask the origin of shoes, of alms-purses, of hoods, of the cockade, of hoop-petticoats, of farthingales, of /Gloves/, of masks, is to drag a /modilogist/ into the frightful maze of sumptuary laws, and upon all the battlefields, where civilisation has triumphed over the gross manners imported into Europe by the barbarism of the Middle Ages.

"Things futile in appearance," continues the author of the /Théorie de la démarche/, "represent either ideas or interests--whether it be bust, or foot, or head"--he might have said, above all, or hand--"you will ever see a social progress, a retrograde system, or some desperate struggle formulating itself by the assistance of some part or other of the dress. Now the shoe announces a privilege, now the hat signals a revolution--a piece of embroidery, a scarf, or some ornament of straw, is the sign of a party. Why should the toilet be then always the most eloquent of styles, if it was not really the whole man, the man with his political opinions, the man with the text of his existence, the hieroglyphic man? To-day /Vestignomy/ has become almost a branch of the art created by Gall and Lavater."

I am overwhelmed, O my indulgent friend! I feel that I have been far inferior to my task, and I fear I have not had that charming art of saying nothing which often says so many things. I have neglected to show you the Glove in princely /Inventaires/, in the old chronicles, and in the delightful tales of Boccaccio, of the Queen of Navarre, of Straparole, of Bonaventure Desperriers, and even in Brantôme, who has written a little story, full of old French /esprit/, on a Glove found in the bed of a fashionable lady. I had a good opportunity of showing you the anecdotic Glove of ever so many romances and memoirs from /Le Petit Jehan de Saintre/ up to Casanova the Venetian, going through /l' Histoire amoureuse des Gaules/.

But the natural and the unpremeditated is also a French quality, of which we must sometimes allow the grace, even in recognising its defects. I left the history of the Glove, I believe, in 1840; and I do not suppose that I have painted for you all the little cuffs, festoons, ruches, notchings, indentations, which adorned the fastenings of the town Gloves of our elegant ladies, nor the long black mittens which accompanied the blonde bodices, of which in those modest times people were madly fond. It is of little consequence for me to follow the fashions from 1840 to the present day: one cannot be a woman and remain ignorant of these different variations of a fashion of which all the specimens return periodically to reconquer a second of celebrity. Open-worked Gloves of Chinese silk, Spanish Gloves, Beaver Gloves, Swedish Gloves, glacé kid Gloves, musketeers' Gloves, Colombine, with cuffs--what do I say?--the qualifications are innumerable; they change still more than the fashion, for the epithet gives a springtide and deceives the customer--/a fortiori/ would it deceive the /Gantuographer/, if you will allow me this hideous neologism.

That which I have not been able to accomplish, that which you have not demanded of me, that which nevertheless would have interested you far more than this sleepy talk, is the /Physiology of the Glove/, with this epigraph taken from an anonymous but witty author--"The style is the man; the Glove is the woman; the style sometimes deceives, but the Glove never."

I am launched, don't you see, into theories historic, philosophic, and, above all, physiognomic, in a study altogether beside the mark?

Allow, my sweet and somnolent one, that if you had permitted me at first to take this part (which for my slight notice was assuredly better), I should have been less clumsily stiff, less dull above all, less pretentious besides; albeit I make no other pretension here than to do your pleasure. You have thrown me the Glove on the confines of history; it is thence that I have raised it with more effeminancy than swagger.

I could have wished that fancy might have dictated to history; but, in the present case, it is the most that has been done, if history has succeeded in warming the amiable fancy, which has not taken Gloves to make us villainously sulky with each other.

Pardon!--indulgent interlocutress!

Excuse also, amiable lady readers, ye who read this congealed babble, and who have yet less reason to be favourable to me, in this sense, that to you all, alas! I cannot say, as was once said in the polite world--/Friendship allows the Glove./

THE MUFF

/THE FUR./

The Muff! The very name has something about it delicate, downy, and voluptuous. From that little warm satin nest, where pretty chilly little hands ensconce themselves in silk, carrying with them a lace handkerchief, a box of lozenges, a bouquet of Parma violets, or a tender loving /billet-doux/, a thousand trifles spring up to please us, like a swarm of souvenirs and caressing thoughts of our first years passed at home, and of our first roving loves.

In childhood, we delight to play with the large maternal Muff, to pass our hands over it the wrong way to excite the electricity of the long hair, to plunge our faces in the pungent heady odour of its down, and to make use of this furred sack in inconceivable tricks, in playing at hide-and-seek with small objects, or in burying therein the familiar cat, who becomes lazy in its warmth.

Then, later on, at the hour of the first rendezvous, during one of those icy winters which Ronsard dreaded for his darling, when we see our so much desired mistress appear veiled and all imprisoned in furs, we become almost jealous of the pretty and coquettish Muff, in which she buries her roguish little nose, which the glacial breeze has lashed and reddened, and we plunge then with a sweet brutality our own hands into the silky cylinder, there to find, and there passionately to press the pretty idle fingers, which we are for so generously thawing, by covering them with long kisses like gloves.

When the Muff returns from exile with the first hoar frosts of November, it causes, as soon as it appears on the boulevards, a sensation, intimate and delicious, to all true /feminists/, to the Dilettanti of woman--to all those who perceive in their most delicate shades the graces of which a naive or coquettish woman can avail herself, whether in handling the Fan or the Sunshade, or in tucking up a corner of a spring petticoat, or in passing along radiant in a long furry pelisse, or more passive in letting herself glide languishingly in a sledge over the ice of the lake, making eyes at her darling who skates by her side, and pushes forward her coquettish equipage. It seems that woman, that exquisite and delicate flower, blossoms in fur, as those white gardenias of the conservatory which half open and develop themselves in a nest of perfumed wadding.

The more she hides, muffles up, deadens, so to speak, her beauty, the more woman--a creature of Hades who makes us dream of paradise--is bewitching in the diabolicity of her graces. When Love, who is represented blind, sets a mask on Venus-coquette, one might think the trickster boy was for burning the universe, for behind those yawning apertures of the black velvet mask, behind those murderous loopholes, two woman's eyes are lying in ambush, pitiless, turn by turn laughing, burning, blazing, drowned in pleasure, charged, in a word, as with grape-shot, with all the shafts of the Cupidonian quiver.

Thus, out of the midst of furs, woman, that mignonette plant, that /mimosa pudica/, throws off beauty more mysterious, more warm, more full of promise, more enveloped and more enveloping, as if from the electricity of that peltry, there was spread in the ambient air of the provoking daughter of Eve an attractive sensuality, like a subtle caress, which rustles against our senses in its passage.

The ancients had perhaps great reason to attach, as they did, certain excellences and prerogatives to fur: a master furrier, Charrier, wrote on this subject, in 1634, remarks and moral considerations as naïve as curious: "Our kings, whether they are consecrated, crowned, or married, divest themselves of the splendour of embroideries and of diamonds, to take their royal mantle hedged about with lilies and lined with ermine.

"The mantles of the chevaliers, dukes, and peers of France are lined with lynx, marten, and ermine; the chancellors, keepers of the seals, who are the guardians of our laws, wear the most exquisite furs.

"Bachelors and doctors, emperors and physicians clothe themselves with furs which represent the mysteries of theology, the maxims of politics, the secrets of medicine. Furs cure people of headaches and disordered stomachs; attacks of gout which triumph over the most potent remedies, are vanquished by the skins of cats, lambs, and hares."

In fine, the good Charrier proves with pride that of all the ornaments which luxury has invented there is none so glorious, so august, so precious, as furs, and that the privileges of peltry merchants rightly surpass those of all others.

The masters and wardens of the peltry merchandise had for their arms a paschal lamb on an azure field. Two ermines supported the shield crested with the ducal crown, with this device in exergue--very like that of Brittany--/Malo mori quam fœdari/.

The use of furs dates back to the origin of the world. Plutarch, in his /Table Talk/, relates that people dressed themselves in skins before they became acquainted with stuffs. Tacitus assures us it was the same with the Teutons, Propertius with the Romans.

Robed in rich silk, the Court you now behold
Was once a folk fur-clad against the cold,

says a poet of the sixteenth century. But without stopping at the conquest of the Golden Fleece, at Rebekah ordering Jacob to put on his hands and neck kids' skins, at all the examples of the Bible and of history, we will only remark that the four noble furs consecrated by feudality were the ermine, the vair, the sable, and the miniver. The colours of furs admitted into coats of arms were those of the sable, the ermine, and the vair.

Charlemagne, who loved, they say, simplicity in his apparel, had, according to Eginhard, the habit of wearing in summer a mantle of otter's skin; but in winter he covered himself with a mantle of which the sleeves were lined with vair and foxes' fur. This is corroborated by the four following verses of Philippe Mousnes, the poet biographer of this Emperor:--

But in the days of fallen leaves,
He wore a new surcoat with sleeves
Of furs of foxes and of vair
To shield him from the nipping air.

At the epoch of the Crusades, the luxury of furs was carried to the highest degree in Western Europe; but to remain absolutely fixed to the Muff, we must register the first apparition of this little fur about the end of the sixteenth century. In the inventory of goods left by the widow of the President Nicolai we read: Item, a Muff of velvet lined with marten.

In Venice, however, we have in our researches found a vestige of the Muff at the end of the fifteenth century; celebrated courtezans and noble ladies at that time carried Muffs, which served for niches to minuscular dogs; and an engraving represents a scene of an interior, in which a fair Venetian seems to be showing her lover the infinite games of her lap-dogs in her Muff.

There were at that time in Venice delicious Muffs made after the primitive fashion of a single band of velvet, brocade, or silk, lined with fine fur, rounded in a cylinder, of which the extremities were closed in different widths by buttons of orient crystal, pearls or gold.

D'Aubigné, in his /Universal History/, says in the course of a story of a besieged town:--"The inhabitants descended thirty paces from the breach, and among the foremost was noticed a woman /with Muffs/, a halberd in her hand, who mixed with and distinguished herself in this combat." Under the designation of /Muffs/ we must understand here spare half-sleeves like those mentioned in the Library of Vauprivas /à propos/ of Louise Labé. Under Charles IX. the simple citizen folk were only allowed to wear black Muffs; ladies of the highest condition had alone a right to sumptuous Muffs of various colours.

In a satiric print of 1634, signed Jaspar Isac, and entitled /The Squire à la Mode/, we see carried by a woman, who is accompanied on foot by a Gascon cavalier, the first French Muff having a direct relation with that which is still in use at the present day. It is a sheath of stuff or silk bordered on both sides by a thick white fur, which grows into an enormous roll at the ends.

But it is amongst the precious engravings of Hollar, Abraham Bosse, Arnoult, Sandrart, Bonnard, and Trouvain that we see the authentic Muff really born, and find it in the hands of the Parisian matron, of the lady of quality in her winter dress, of the /Précieuse/, and the coquetting flirt. An engraving of Bonnard shows us a great lady with her head dressed à la Fontange, and in court dress, on the point of going out; a waiting-maid adjusts her mantle, and a gentleman attends the beauty's good pleasure; the Muff she carries was then of a moderate size, with a bow in the middle. The Muff was worn for style, "for grace," and was made of sable-marten for ladies of the Court, and simply of dogskin or catskin for the small citizens' wives who could not devote more than fifteen to twenty francs to the acquisition of this light hand-warmer.

Antoine Furetière, in his /Dictionary/, has condensed in a few lines all the materials of a Dissertation on the Muff of the seventeenth century. At the word /Muff/ we read:--

A fur worn in winter, in which to put the hands, to keep them warm. /Muffs/ were formerly only for women: at the present day they are carried by men. The finest /Muffs/ are made of marten, . . . . the common of miniver; . . . . the country /Muffs/ of the cavaliers are made of otter and of tiger. A woman puts her nose in her /Muff/ to hide herself. A little /Muff/-dog is a little dog which ladies can carry in their /Muff/.

Everything we see is summed up in this. Saint-Jean and Bonnard have preserved for us types of French gentlemen bearing the Muff under Louis XIV. One, in court dress, carries with much grace a small spotted Muff, which he holds in one hand, showing a glimpse at the unoccupied end of the cuff of a fur glove; another, in winter court-dress, holds with the languor of a /petit-maître/ a pretty plump otter Muff falling to the hips, giving a gracious curve to the arm; in the middle of this Muff a vast bow of ribbons or /Galants/, something like the old trimming called /petite oie/, is displayed with an excellent effect. In 1680, nothing, according to the /Mercure Galant/, was to be seen but ribbons purfled with gold, laced, fringed, wreathed, purled, or embroidered, which were gathered in a bow in front, of the Muff.

La Fontaine alludes doubtless to the country Muff spoken of by Furetière when, in the fable of the /Monkey and the Leopard/, he makes the latter say:--

The king desires me at his Court,
And must have--if I die for't--
A /Muff/, made of my skin, so full of blots
Of colour, and of lines, and dots,
And dappled stains, and chequered spots.

As to the Muff-dog--to finish the registration of the definition of Furetière--not only has Hollar left us an engraving of it, and presented it to us under the form of a small Spaniel, but Father du Cerceau makes his /upholsterer poet/ say--Even the lady's lapdog barked at me, that ingrate

Cadet, for whom I used to stuff
So many sweets inside my Muff.

The chief hall of the peltry merchants and furriers of the 17th century, in Paris, was in the Rue de la Tabletterie or Rue des Fourreurs, which led into the cross-way of the Place aux Chats. The shops of the retail peltry merchants were nearly all situated in the City, Rue Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie, and Rue de la Juiverie.

"In these places," says Léger, "are to be found very beautiful Muffs for men and for women, and very fashionable ones . . . there are to be sold also very beautiful amices of miniver." He adds a word about the Palatines properly got up, composed of skins of animals, foreign and native. The /Livre commode des adresses de Paris/ contains some designations of peltry merchants and furriers towards the end of the seventeenth century.

Fashion altered the shape of the Muff considerably under Louis XIV. From the rare documents which we have been able to catalogue, we have easily found numerous modifications in both form and volume. Sometimes narrow and long, sometimes broad and short, it would be impossible to assign to this little chattel an exact type for all that epoch.

The Muff triumphed already, under Louis XIII., in the empire of oglings and at the Place Royale, as it reigned later at Versailles, and showed itself in sedan chairs in the midst of the alleys of the park at the visiting hour, lending always to woman a charming countenance and exquisite graces.

Scarron, in his /Poésies Diverses/, has left us in four verses a pretty picture of manners for any one who could morally develop it. The poor cripple Scarron certainly had no need of a Muff in his arm-chair!--

My wife then leaves at once, though she
All perils should divide with me;
She takes her Muff and goes
To see some one she knows. . . .

But let us leave the age of big wigs and Fontange head-dresses, and penetrate into the age of powder and patches, into the age of Voltaire, who, /à propos/ of one of his characters in /Micromégas/, wrote:

"Imagine a very small Muff-dog following a captain of the Guards of the King of Prussia."

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 XVIII^e 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;
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/!

In 1788 a fashion was Muffs of Siberian wolf. According to the /Magasin des Modes Nouvelles Françaises et Anglaises/, the young folks no longer carried their Muff after the peaceable and good citizen-like fashion /à la papa/ level with the bottom of the waistcoat; they used it, on the contrary, like a plaything or an opera hat; they held it in their hand while gesticulating in their promenades, or carried it under their arms like a portfolio strangled and crumpled between the elbow and the chest.

The little dogs, the Muff-toy-terriers, which had continued in favour since the Regency, were more in request now than ever; every woman of fashion had her pug and her King Charles' pet, like those small dogs that now come from Havanna.

In the celebrated coloured engraving of Debucourt, /La Galerie de Bois au Palais-Royal/, in 1787, we see circulating in the midst of that strange crowd which was called the medley of the Palais-Royal, extravagant types, among them women holding in their hand beside their furred cloak those incredible Muffs of an immense size, which figure also under the arms of the masked gallants of the time, with a small bow of satin attached to the fur.

Under the Revolution and the Directory the fashion of Muffs was extremes, either broad as little barrels, or narrow and minuscular; in other respects the fashion varied infinitely, and we must come to the Restoration to find the first chinchilla Muffs which harmonised with the velvet witchouras. Absurd fashions to study! What Muff would the painter choose who wished, by way of allegory, to show a grasshopper shivering in the hoar frost and the snow, to whom charitable Love brings a downy Muff? A pretty subject for a concourse of an Academy which claimed to be /précieuse/ and refined.

In 1835, Muffs, boas, palatines, cloaks lined with marten or fox, affected odious and indescribable forms: they used to make for a time Glove-Muffs, a sort of mittens of marten, which were soldered on to one another where the hands crossed. The Muff, that accessory of the toilet, ought to be in harmony with the general tonality and style of costume. Therefore, to undertake to describe it at that epoch would be only possible in sketching a complete history of Fashion.