The pastoral simplicity of the Petit Trianon should have really made more lasting impression than it did. For the Court ladies played at milkmaids under the rule of their farmer Queen, and churned butter with their own fair hands, and found a wide field for dainty disguises in rustic and ruinous simplicity. The peasant girls' dresses of stuffs and muslin were glorified by rich silks and muslin and challis decked with lace fichus and crowned with rose-coloured and be-ribboned straw hats, and embroidered holland and Persian cambric were affected economies no less expensive than the maize-coloured silk and striped green and white satin of avowed prodigality. The Trianon was a happy hunting-ground for flirtation, but that is another story, indeed a great many; but it served too as a pretext for innumerable new frocks, and the colour-prints of the time convincingly prove the dainty possibilities afforded by the artifice of simplicity allied to a nice taste in ribbons. We have to go back to the days of Marie Antoinette for a practice which aroused some interest and amusement when a dressmaker in London last year was fired with a desire to revive it. Gowns were invested with the power to express special emotion, and Molière held the notion up to ridicule in his famous _Précieuses_. Long narrow shoes with the seam at the heel, whose socket was studded with jewels, were called _venez-y-voir_; and this suggestion of forwardness was again evident in a ribbon which went by the name of "marked attention." Other absurdities often quoted were the gown known as the "stifled sigh," trimmed with "superfluous regrets," and the cap of "assured conquest," and a muff of "momentary agitation." Towards the end of the reign of Louis XVI. the low head-dress came into fashion, the short curls being gathered into a knot of ribbon or "catogan," and the fair moderated their transports for powdered hair which had abundantly obtained in white, reddish blonde, and grey. Marie Antoinette knew all there was to know of the art of dress, and recognising the supreme charm of caprice, she would ring every change in turn; and perhaps she never looked more exquisitely beautiful than when, her hair powdered and her face faintly lined by sorrow, she met the scaffold and the mob on the last day of her existence, in her plain black dress and simple white fichu. CHAPTER IX IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY On trying to set down a chronicle of dress as it lived in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, my mind becomes immediately obsessed with short-waisted gowns; and a vision of the hapless Josephine--whose name, by the way, I should have added to the list of the few who have stood godmother to a fashion--immediately appears before me in her graceful short-skirted evening dress with its high Empire belt.