According to this picture, which is attributed to Clouet, lords and ladies competed for the palm of absurdity in their costumes. It shows us nothing but pointed bodices preposterously
Padded sleeves.
tightened, and doublets with pointed abdomens, so that both men and women have the appearance of insects, the former lookino- like bio; bees, the latter like wasps.
GRANDE TOILETTE MÉDICIS.
The ridiculously long-busked bodices have enormous padded sleeves, as thick on the shoulders as the whole body, and formed of a series of rolls and slashes, edged with pearls or gilded braid, with cuffs of fine lace to match the ruff.
The farthingale had been considerably enlarged, it was now of a bell-shape, or like an enormous soap-tureen turned upside-down ; over it two garments were worn, the upper-dress, of rich brocade or stuff covered with embroidery, was open so as to disjolay the under-dress of a different colour but equally ornamented.
When the troubles and the confusion of the time Avere at their worst, when Leaguers, Royalists, and Huguenots were shooting and hanging each other all over the kinçjdom, Damville, the eldest of the Count de Montmorency's three sons, who had taken up arras for a fourth party, that of the * politicals,' who were allied to the Huguenots in the South, became seriously indebted to the invention of the cumbersome farthingale. Beins; surrounded at Béziers, he Avas about to be taken, and in great danger, but one of his relations, Louise de Montagnard, the wife of
TiiC short Henri Trois cloak.
Francis de Tressan, carried hiui off in her coach, hidden under the spreading width of her immense farthingale, and j)assed him through under tlie very nose of his enemies.
This was the second instance of salvage by the farthingale, but there may have been many more which history has not deigned to record. The crinoline, an old acci[uaint-ance of our own, has no such deeds of high emprise to its credit. Its vast circumference was indeed also utilized, not for such dramatic escapes, but by fraudulently-ingenious females, who carried articles on which they ought to have paid duty slung on its hoops.
The corset was no longer the simple ' basquine ' ; that was inoffensive enough at first. The ' corps piqué,' which was endured by the fair ladies of this later period, was an instrument of torture, a hard and solid mould into which the wearer had to be compressed, there to remain and suffer, in spite of the splinters of wood that " penetrated the flesh, took the skin off the waist, and made the ribs ride up one over the other." Montaigne and Ambroise Paré are witnesses on behalf of this indictment of the ' corps pi([ué,' and the latter, at least, must have known somethinfr about it.
Like the farthingale, 'only more so/ the corset will witness the burial of successive ages, will survive all other fashions, notwithstandiusr every attack upon it, and the doctors who are unanimous in their excommunication of it, and
Under Henry III.
will be ever-victorious over all and sundry, victorious against the clearest evidence. The absurd ' mignons ' of Henry the Third actually succeeded in making men adopt it for a while !
The celebrated beauties of the time, Queeu Margot, and her husband's mistress Madame de Sauves, look like idols braced up in damascened cuirasses, in their state costumes, with their stiff, glitterinQ- bodices, and their
Margot.
gorgeous array of gold and precious stones. " Touch me not !" say those formidable pointed ruÉfs, and yet the wearers of them were by no means inaccessible.
All the women of the period, sad and sombre as it was, were bitten by this mauia for luxury. There was not one of the smaller nobility, or a lawyer's wife, or a ' city madam,' who did not try to imitate the great ladies in everything, to the displeasure of their husbands.
Full dress, Médicis style.
and the peril of fortunes which had already suffered by the evils of the time.
The brilliant sixteenth century, the age of the Renaissance, which gave birth to so many artists and men of letters, to doughty knights, and dazzling dames, came nevertheless to a bad ench Over that termination, about that epoch of Henry the Third with his corrupt refinement, about the Court and the City, about fair and noble women and exquisites and ' mignons,' there hung a scent of blood which it needed all the strong perfumes, the musk and amber then in vogue, to overpower and disguise.
Marguerite de Valois, a flower whose perfume was deadly, was to survive this epoch, and to die in 1615, some years later than Henri Quatre, her former husband. To the last she was an old coquette, painted, bedizened, and musk-scented, and she strove, in despite of her age, and the corpulence that destroyed her goddess-like pretensions, to keep up the solemn and stately graces and the state costumes of her best days. She migrated regularly with her little Court from her château in Languedoc to her Parisian Hôtel de Sens, which still exists, now and again promoting to her good graces some handsome cavalier, or some pretty page—a page like those mentionea in the chronicle of her earlier 3^ears, when she was accused of having their boyish locks shorn to make lisfht-colon red wio^s for her own wear.
Shortly before the death of this princess, now " the grotesque Margot," one of these petted pages was stabbed under her roof by an equerry who aspired to the exclusive possession of the favour of the aged Queen. Marguerite became as infuriated as a wounded lioness, and in order to avenge the object of her very latest love she claimed her feudal right of doing justice in her own house (in Scottish feudal times, this was called the right of " pit and gallows "), condemned the guilty person to death, and had him beheaded forthwith under her own bloodthirsty eyes, in the presence of a mob, on the very threshold of the Hôte] de Sens.
DAMP. LOUIS XIII.
The collerette ruff.
VI.
HENRY THE FOURTH AND LOUIS THE THIRTEENTH.
A return to comparative simplicity—Women-towers— Tall head-dresses—The excommunication of bare necks—Gowns with large flower-patterns—High necks and low necks—Long waists—Richelieu's edicts—The obedient lady—Short waists.
Some eras live long, but others die young ; the sixteenth oentury, which had an exceptionally strong constitution, lasted until the end of the reign of the Béarnais, with its ideas and its manners, its ways and its modes. We shall afterwards see that the seventeenth century lasted in the same way under Louis XIV. to the detriment of the eighteenth, and that the charming but unfortunate eighteenth century came to a melancholy and premature close, dying suddenly in the year '89.
The years of grace of the sixteenth century, under the sceptre of Henri Quatre, were like convalescence after brain-fever ; while they lasted, France, reduced to extremity by her malady, revived, the poison was expelled from her veins, all was repaired, cleansed, and sanitated.
After the absurd and unwholesome devices of the reign of Henry the Third, dress assumed an unpretending character, an aspect of good, honest frankness, if we may be permitted to talk of frankness in dress. The costume was, indeed, but little altered, but the lines were simplified, and all that was superfluous in the details was suppressed.
No doubt the fashions for both sexes were less elegant, and there was a good deal that was absurd in them even yet, but this absurdity was harmless. Excessive pretension, with dissolute grace and refinement, had been discarded ; but fashion, in seeking simplicity, had strayed into heaviness and awkwardness, only, however, to emerge from both into the bold and dashing elegance of the costume of the period of Louis XIII. Yet we must not take this simplicity too literally, for it was only comparative.