DURING THE EIGHTEENTH AND THE BEGINNING OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. BY FAYETTE ROBINSON. (_Concluded from page 266._) When Parisian society had passed the dread ordeal which bears the name of the Reign of Terror, through continual scenes of blood and tears, it seemed by a strange and almost unaccountable impulse to be impelled to mirth and festivity. On the day after the disappearance of the guillotine French frivolity resumed its sway with a thousand whims and vagaries, to which the stern muse of history would pay no attention, but to which, in this sketch of the follies of humanity, we may aptly attend. One of the whimsicalities peculiar to the day is that in memory of the sad toilette of the guillotine, when the hair was cropped by the shears of the executioner, a similar _coiffure_ was the _mode_. Women laid aside their luxuriant locks for a _coiffure à la victime_, and wore a band of blood-red velvet around the neck, as if in derision of the fall of the axe. This fashion, emanating in France, where recklessness had been produced by the constant presence of danger, went the round of the world, and the _coiffure à la victime_ was worn by both sexes in quiet neighborhoods, which had learned only by report of the fearful atrocities committed in the capital of civilization. Balls _à la victime_ also became the vogue, and none were at first admitted to them except those who had lost relations on the scaffold. To some of these balls it was requisite not to have lost collaterals only, but a parent, or brother, sister, husband or wife. There were exclusives even there, and a new nobility of the scaffold was created. This was the era of corsets _à la justice_ and bonnets _à la humanité_.