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

Rows of pearls formed square or lozenge-sliaped designs on the bodices and skirts. The girdle, with very long ends, was also of jeweller's work ; at one extremity hung a small mirror, richly set, which the wearer had in her hand constantly, so that she might inspect the condition of her precious but troublesome attire, and especially the immense ruff, which was a serious inconvenience, with all its majestic elegance, on social occasions, and at the crowded Court entertainments.

It is easy to estimate what the burden of the costume of the period must have been, by merely looking at a picture in the Louvre which represents a Court Ball given on the marriaçje of the Due de Joveuse with the King's sister-in-law. This was a famous wedding, celebrated with unexampled splendour by twenty-five or thirty days' festivities, jousts and masquerades, during which the entire Court, jorinces and princesses, lords and ladies, vied with each other in the fantastic sumptuousness of their daily-changed costumes.

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.