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 volatile 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

BONNET, 1786.

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

The extravagance and luxury of the fashion

open shirts, cravats, powdered queues, canes, and even cloth frock-coats of the men. The fashion

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

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

for a time a strange turn. A year before men went in red night-caps, and magistrates wore wooden shoes. Now the citizens emulated the times of the Regency in the extravagance if not in the elegance of their costumes. The most popular entertainments were the bals ù victime. To be admitted to these one must have lost a relative by the guillotine. The dancers wore crape about the arm, and gayly danced in honor of the deceased. It became the fashion to show the profoundest abhorrence of the Reign of Terror. Instead of Robe

spierre's tappedurs, "hard-crackers," young muscadines, or dandies, in swallow-tailed coats, with their hair plaited at the temples, and flowing behind in military fashion, made it a duty to knock down any shag-coated Jacobin they chanced to encounter. The ladies, too, expressed their horror of the bloody time in a fashion of their own. The Jacobins had made a virtue of destroying life; the production of life must be

fold nor the brutalities of Jacobinism could long suppress the pretensions of the young elegants to dress as they pleased. Indeed, it became a species of heroism, by extravagant finery and outrageous taste, joined to a mincing, effeminate voice, to throw contempt upon the coarseness of their political opponents. The "jeunesse dorée" of this period were clerks, young lawyers, and others of equally humble origin, who, having aided in destroying the old aristocracy, now sought to excel them in vice and folly.

Each succeeding year gave origin to fashions if possible more absurd than the preceding. The moral chaos that prevailed in France affected all material things. Dress was not only more or less typical of politics, but illustrative of the classical theories of the times. The military scholar of the school of Mars in 1793, wore a mongrel uniform, invented by the painter David, and intended to be partly Roman, partly Grecian, but which any old legendary or phalanx veteran of Cæsar or Alexander would have indignantly rejected as wholly French.

Upon the overthrow of Robespierre, fashion took

PROMENADE COSTUME, 1801.

the grand virtue under the new state of things. Hence in 1794 it was noticed that every fashionable citoyenne was either really or apparently far advanced in maternity.

The "Merveilleuse" of the same year, by the capacity of her bonnet and the slimness of her skirts, will recall a fashion which undoubtedly some of my readers thought "extremely elegant" in its day, but which would now be likely to consign its wearer to a mad-hospital.

The male specimen of this species was scarcely less remarkable in his choice of attire; while the "Agioteur"-a political bully, a blackguard, on a par in principles and practice with some of his kindred who disgrace our republic-wore a costume which, like the stripes of a hyena, distinguished him at once from the more respectable citizen.

The attempt, under the auspices of David, to revive the classical toga, and to model the fashions for the ladies after the costumes of Aspasia and Agrippina, met with but transient success, owing to the severity of the climate-which was particularly unfavorable to bare throats and legs,

"MERVEILLEUX," 1793.

and transparent muslin. Besides, none but those whom nature had bountifully clothed with charms could with complacency thus dispense with dress. Coughs, rheumatisms, and ridicule, soon extinguished all classical ardor among these few, though many of the fashionable women of the day were willing to sacrifice both modesty and health in their desire to carry back the civilization of the world two thousand years, when silk was worth its weight in gold and cotton an unknown thing. While the fashion lasted its want of adaptation to the climate gave rise to some ludicrous scenes. Thus at the famous "Feast of Pikes," when all Paris was gathered in the open air, a sudden storm of rain came down. The thin muslins with which the females had attired themselves "like the women of the free peoples of antiquity," were soaked through in a moment, and clung closely around their wearers, so that, as the dry chronicler remarks, "the shape was clearly discernible." "Titus" and "Alcibiades" would have been more than human to have refrained from laughing at the spectacle presented by the bedraggled "Clorinda" and " Aspasia.”