Part 6

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:--