‘Love uses a fan as an infant does a toy—makes it assume all sorts of shapes; breaks it even, lets it fall a thousand times to the ground.... ‘Is it a matter of indifference, this fallen fan? Such a fall is the result of reflection, of careful calculation, intended as a test of the ardour and celerity of aspiring suitors.—And the successful suitor, the favoured swain? Is it not he who discovers the greatest celerity in returning the fan to its charming owner, and, in doing so, imprints a secret but chaste kiss upon the fair hand that takes it, and is rewarded by a look ten thousand times more eloquent than speech?’ And if, peradventure, by the spell of some magician, this little instrument could itself be endowed with speech! Aha! ma chère madame, what tales could it not unfold from the recesses of its fluted leaves, what whispers! what confidences! what assignations! what _intrigues_! ‘Pour une Espagnole,’ writes Charles Blanc, ‘toutes les intrigues de l’amour, tous les manœuvres de la galanterie, sont cachées dans les plis de son éventail. Les audaces furtifs du regard, les aventures de la parole, les aveux risqués, les demi-mots proférés du bout des lèvres, tout cela est dissimulé par l’éventail, qui a l’air d’interdire ce qu’il permet de faire, et d’intercepter ce qu’il envoie.’ Disraeli (_Contarini Fleming_), in similar strain, with no less eloquence, says: ‘A Spanish lady with her fan might shame the tactics of a troop of horse. Now she unfolds it with the slow pomp and conscious elegance of the bird of Juno; now she flutters it with all the languor of a listless beauty, now with all the liveliness of a vivacious one. Now in the midst of a very tornado she closes it with a whirr, which makes you start. Magical instrument! in this land it speaks a particular language, and gallantry requires no other mode to express its most subtle conceits, or its most unreasonable demands, than this delicate machine.’ ‘Women,’ says the witty _Spectator_, ‘are armed with Fans as men with Swords—and sometimes do more execution with them.... There is an infinite variety of motions to be made use of in the _flutter of a Fan_. There is the angry Flutter, the modest Flutter, the timorous Flutter, the confused Flutter, the merry Flutter, and the amorous Flutter. Not to be tedious, there is scarce any emotion in the mind which does not produce a suitable agitation in the Fan; insomuch that if I only see the Fan of a disciplined Lady I know very well whether she laughs, frowns, or blushes. I have seen a Fan so very angry, that it would have been dangerous for the absent lover who provoked it to have come within the wind of it: and at other times so very languishing, that I have been glad for the Lady’s sake the lover was at a sufficient distance from it. I need not add that a Fan is either a Prude or Coquette according to the nature of the person who bears it.’