"Yester-year"; ten centuries of toilette from the French of A. Robida

In this day of 'the unbraced cestus,' fashion invented loose gowns without either bodice or girdle, hanging straight from the slioulders over the wide-spread panier, or only fitted to the waist in front, and left quite loose with large folds at the back. This device gave the wearer an air of pretty carelessness and indolent OTace, the distino-uishinsr mark of the age.

The thick and heavy stuffs of the preceding l^eriod were unfit for these loose hanging gowns, and to drape the vastness of the paniers, so lighter fabrics were adopted, lawn, muslin, dimity, and other thin stuffs with bouquet patterns, or scattered flowers, or even little rural designs.

On fine days the promenades were crowded with ladies who looked as though they had come out in their morning costume, in gowns fashioned like dressing-gowns, their arms emerging from clouds of lace, and tlieir faces from soft frills, as they waved tlieir fans, and lazily clicked tlieir higli-lieeled slippers.

It was the period of the Regency ! There is a world of meaning in that word. The suppers and the orgies of the Palais-Royal were largely imitated elsewhere ; there was many a Parabère in the gay and pleasure-loving city, which had just then been thrown into fresh excitement by the fever of sjieculation. Day after day the believers in John Lav/ were either enriched or ruined ; some making fabulous fortunes that enabled them to procure every kind and every degree of enjoyment, others being beggared, so that they had to drown their sorrows in dissipation at any cost.

The satirists of the pen had plenty of material in the loose gowns, the paniers, the head-dresses, the gew-gaws, all the daily inventions of fashion. Plays and songs, the Italian theatre, and the booth in the fair, caricatures and pamphlets, ridiculed the preposterous paniers, while the triumphant paniers mocked the mockers, and swelled themselves out more and more vaingloriously.

Everybody laughed or lamented. Here were several ladies to be accommodated in a coach which could only hold one with her balloon-skirt ? Everything was too small ; the streets were too narrow ; salon-doors had to be widened to allow the overgrown ladies to pass in, just as it became necessary afterwards to make the doors higher at the top, so that the gigantic head-dresses of later days might enter without a hitch.

The arm-chairs were not big enough ; how Was a lady to sit down with those tremendous hoops, which either refused to be squeezed into the seat, or started up in the most embarrassing way ?

Nevertheless, paniers went on growing larger until the early] days of Marie Antoinette, and the skirts worn over them were laden more and more heavily with big and little flounces, lattice work, pleated frills, scallops, or ribbons arranged in a thousand different ways. These fashions were in some cases as pretty as

Large P.iuier.

they were comphcated, but in otliers they were merely absurd.

Under the gown, which continued to be worn loose and flowing for a long time, à la Watteau, the 'body' or corset strictly confined the bust, the satin bodice was pointed and the waist very long; as it was low-necked, a ' breast-front ' of lace and ribbons protected the chest from cold.

Mantles were adapted to the season or the temperature ; that is to say, they were either pi'etty little mantillas^ which just covered the shoulders, with a light frilled silk or satin hood, or cloaks covering the entire figure down to the heels; the hood was held out by a hoop of brass wire around the head. From 1725 to 1770 or 75, the fashion in gowns retained the same lines, and almost the same general arrangements, the swelling skirts, the clouds of lace, and the bunches of ribbon. The best period of the mode of the eighteenth century, that in which the Louis Quinze costume was at its highest point of elegance, was between 1750 and 1770, the middle period between the exaggeration of ^ Cofjuehichoiis (obsolete).

the Regency time and that of Louis XVI., which was no less unreasonable.

During those years her beautiful, astute, artistic, and encroaching majesty, Madame de Pompadour, reigned. If we would summon up a vision of that radiant period and realize its charm, we have but to quote the names

A little milliuer.

of Boucher, Baudoin, La Tour, Lancret, Pater, Elsen, Gravelot, Saint-Aubin, and the whole galaxy of fops and exquisites, scented and silly indeed, but also delightfully polished and graceful.

There was corruption under the perfume of roses, it is true, and it will not do to scratch that vernis-Martin society too deeply; there was so much ' laisser-aller ' and * laisser-faire ' everywhere, and it was so difficult to be scandalized by anything whatsoever.