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

tlieir literary pabulum in the Middle-Ages— tlie troubadours of the Vicomte d'Arlincourt, Ossian, Byron, and Walter Scott, had liad tlicir day—in the imj)assioned tirades of the great dramas of the time, Hcrnani, La Tour de Ncsle, and Lucrèce Jjorfj/a, and in the verses, novels, and chronicles of the ' romantic ' writers of young France.

But, even on the stage, the Middle Ages were a good deal like 1830, for notwith-

Head-dress à la Cliiuoisc, 1830.

standing the pains taken to reproduce local colouring, the heroines of those dramas, Isabcan, Marguerite de Bourgogne, or la Belle Ferronière, wore the inevitable leg-of-mutton sleeves, iu connnou witli the fair si»eet;it()rs, and, in reality, the belles of LSod, while trying hard to be mediaeval, were still up to date. Alas ! these pretty, graceful, feathery fashions,

Laryu hat and collerette.

of a ' truculent ' elegance, to employ an expression of the time, passed a^vay. The anti-picturesque bourgeois reaction, which set in with the Arts, achieved a far more rapid triumph ill dross. After a few years fasliion became —must tlie word be said ?—wiser. In 1835 or I80G, fashion, tlie poetic, the romantic, the chivahic, became commonplace, the fashion of shopkeepers and the wives of the National Guard ! In 1835, fashion discarded grace, and adopted clumsiness, by exaggerating the characteristics of 1830. The women were no longer those of Devéria and Gavarni, they are those of Grandville,

Skirts were as big as bells, and untriinmed, made either of plain white muslin, or printed in silly httle patterns like the wall-paper of the same j^eriocl. Big leg-of-mutton sleeves were worn quite limp, hanging loose and low over narrow wristbands ; over the bodice were large worked pelerines edged with lace, and falling below the waist. Add to this a large bonnet of Leghorn or rice-straw, closed and tied under the chin, and the combination is certainly not attractive.

Contemplating the ladies of 1830 ten years later, in 1840, we find them wearing shapeless, uutrimmed skirts, hesitating sleeves which retain just enough of the fulhiess of the leg-of-niuttou to be ugly, ' anyhow ' bodices, and

House dress.

unsightly bonnets tied under the chin by unsightly ribbons.

Hair-dressing has none of the pretty audacity of former times ; flat bands make a cold, hard framework for the face, those ' chaste ' bands, as they were then called, which killed all grace, and all beauty ; there were also the ' English ' ringlets, droopiug like the twigs of the weeping-

Eomautic dress.

willow, and giving a whimpering expression to the most cheerful of feminine faces. Fashion became more and more dull and ugly at the end of the July Monarchy. Taste there was

none ; insipidity and commonplace were supreme.

The fashions always go from the widest to the narrowest, and come back from the narrowest to the widest. This is a law. It

1830.

is the same iii the case of head-gear, the mode goes, and always will go, from the smallest to the largest, and back again from the largest to the smallest, with unfailing regularity.

After the panier of the time of Louis XV.

and Louis XVI. catne the clinging gown of the Directory—the primitive expression of the skirt—and then nothing remained but its suppression. From the ' sheath ' gowns of the Empire, amplitude was developed by degrees, and the great maximum of width was regained under the Second Empire, with the third restoration of the farthingale, now bearing the name of crinoline.

1835.

XIL

THE MODERN EPOCH.

1848—Revolutions everywhere, except in the kingdom of Fashion—Universal reign of crinoline—Cashmere shawls—The Talma, the burnous, and the 'pinch-waist ' (pince-taille) — Sea-side fashions — Short gowns—The 'jump in' costume (saute-en-barque) —Wide and narrow skirts—Clinging fashions—Poufs and bustles— Valois fashions—More erudition than imagination—A ' fin-de-siècle ' fashion in demand.

The Eevolution of 1848, unlike the first, did not afifect Fashion at all ; it did not drive the mode into new paths. In that day of topsy-turveydom, when the whole of Europe seemed to be infected by the revolutionary spirit, when the excited brain of the nations was crowded with many dreams, more or less fair, more or less foolish, fashion, which may certainly be admitted to be mad nor'-nor'-west, conducted itself with wisdom and prudence ; indeed it remained so distinctly bourgeois tliat it might have been supposed to be ' set ' by Mme. Prudhomme. Mean and ugly bonnets of a smaller 'cabriolet' kind, tied under the chin witli narrow ribbons, were universally worn; in fact only one shape, with the curtain, and ribbon-trimming, was in vogue. Gowns, too, were quite plain, the bodice very long, the skirt straight.